The Day the Sun Died

Starred review from October 1, 2018
Yan (The Years, Months, Days) trains his fantastical, satiric eye on China’s policy of forced cremation in this chilling novel about the “great somnambulism” that seizes a rural town. Horrified to learn that the bodies cremated by his brother-in-law in accordance with the mandate to “save farmland” from being wasted on graves leaves behind residual “corpse oil,” a funerary shop owner named Tianbao agrees to buy and hide the oil rather than let it be shipped to factories ignorant of its origin. His son, Niannian, helps with this grim task, considering himself “like a tree that had grown up at the entrance of the underworld.” That threshold is breached one midsummer night, when the townspeople begin “dreamwalking.” Reports arrive of accidental drownings involving the dreamwalkers, then of a murder with an iron rod. Looting and violence spread as more people begin dreamwalking, until the town is “engulfed in the sounds of screams and murderous beatings.” The interweaving of politics and delusion creates a powerful resonance that is amplified by Tianbao’s borderline mythical plan for how to “drive away the darkness,” leading to an unforgettable ending. This is a riveting, powerful reading experience. Agent: Laura Susijn, the Susijn Agency.

Starred review from October 1, 2018
Satire meets sci-fi, horror, and social criticism in the prolific Chinese novelist Yan's latest concoction.Something is always happening in Yan's villages: They're booming in The Explosion Chronicles (2016), turning into Red Disneylands in Lenin's Kisses (2012), imploding under the weight of profiteers' schemes in Dream of Ding Village (2011). Our narrator here is 14-year-old Li Niannian, nicknamed "Stupid Niannian," who laments, "My own reputation is as minuscule as a speck of dust lost in a pile of sesame seeds, or a flea nit hidden on the back of a camel, an ox, or a sheep." The child of morticians, he lives across the way from a writer named Yan Lianke in Gaotian, a village that, Niannian believe, lies at the center of the world. When we meet him, Niannian is imploring the celestial beings to protect Gaotian, his family, and Yan from decidedly weird events--for the people of Gaotian have turned in for the night, but they cannot sleep, and as they "dreamwalk" they do untoward things: Uncle Zhang goes off to work a field, waking in a start, only to chide himself: "You are truly fucking debased! Your wife ran away with someone else while you were busy working, yet you still come here to thresh grain for her." More dangerously, Zhang Mutou, sure that his wife is messing around, finds her supposed lover while sound asleep and cracks his skull. Other dark mischief and many deaths--539, precisely--ensue, so that the village's busiest enterprise is the crematorium, producing a gusher of icy-smelling "corpse oil": "Most of this coldness was produced from people's hearts, and without it the barrel would simply have been an ordinary barrel of oil." It's as if to say that the official dream of "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" is capable of producing only death--a message that surely won't cheer the Politburo, for which reason Yan's work is often banned in his native country.As dreamscape realized, however horrible, Yan's novel belongs in the company of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and even James Joyce's Ulysses.

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November 1, 2018
Everyone believed in dreams, but didn't believe in reality. It was all quite odd. Lianke (The Years, Months, Days, 2017)?, winner of the prestigious Dream of the Red Chamber Award for Chinese-language novels and the author of dozens of novels, novellas, and short story collections, tells a dark and sinister story set in the Balou Mountains. Li Niannian sits with his father outside of his family's funeral parlor one evening when Uncle Xia arrives seeking funeral materials for his father, who drowned while dreamwalking. Then Li observes Uncle Zhang dreamwalking, going to the field to thresh wheat in his sleep. Soon, in one increasingly bizarre night, the entire town begins to slip into manic dreamwalking, as people put their thoughts into practice and carry out what is engraved in their bones. As chaos ensues, Li and his parents try to save the town from this waking nightmare before sunrise. In his unflinching satire, Lianke shows an incredible mastery of words, both brilliantly humorous and offbeat, making this novel a gripping read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)