![]() Yet the writer himself proceeds not from exile but, in fact, from the center. Subsequently, seemingly every other novel of Yan’s is edgy enough to be publishable only outside of mainland China, in Taiwan or Hong Kong. He worked in the army, including its propaganda department, for over 25 years until the publication of Lenin’s Kisses (2004) forced him to leave - the novel portrays the efforts of disabled peasants to purchase Lenin’s embalmed corpse with money raised from a touring talent show in order to boost the local tourism industry. At 20, he joined the military, where he started to write in earnest. Yan’s background provides an entry into Hard Like Water. Not sacrilege but the ardor of the revolution serves as the aphrodisiac. What separates the two, however, is that in Serve the People! the protagonists are turned on by profaning the sacred, while in Hard Like Water they are turned on by the sacred itself. On the surface, it bears a resemblance to Serve the People! Both are set in the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–’76), with a plot driven by a torrid affair. The latest is Hard Like Water.Īrguably the most important of Yan’s earlier novels, Hard Like Water, was published - and not banned - in 2001. Since then, a steady stream of English translations has appeared, owing single-handedly to the prodigious efforts of Carlos Rojas. His first two books available in English - Serve the People!, translated by Julia Lovell, in which a couple is erotically aroused by the desecration of Maoist objects, and Dream of Ding Village, translated by Cindy Carter, about the rural spread of AIDS - were both banned in China. PROLIFIC AND PROVOCATIVE, the Chinese author Yan Lianke is known in the Anglophone world as a rebel. Idiom as Instrument: On Yan Lianke’s “Hard Like Water”
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