2014 Nomination Statement

c h in se lera tu re to d ay v o l. 10 n . 1 contemporary Chinese history and reality. By telling the story of the village of Shouhuo, a place of collective seclusion that resembles the utopia depicted by Tao Yuanming in his famous “Peach Blossom Spring,” Yan Lianke poignantly questions both the Communist utopian dream of the revolutionary period and the economic utopian dream of the market-reform era. In this novel, the mixture of realism and surrealism, heaviness and lightness, paradoxically makes the real compelling, essential, and apocalyptic, moving beyond any kind of textual playfulness. Yan Lianke’s masterpiece The Four Books, which is regarded as one of his most imaginative creations, has touched upon the Great Famine that was a forbidden and sensitive topic in mainland China. Echoing the texts of Confucianism and the four Gospels of the New Testament, The Four Books has provided four different narrative voices, which interweave the tapestry of life and death, body and soul, and put Chinese intellectuals represented by the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian, and Technician in the unbearable ordeal to show the complexity of human nature. Showing a philosophical dimension that is often lacking in modern Chinese literature, this novel is extremely innovative in narrative structure and language, powerfully representing one of China’s most traumatic periods. With thrilling action, unforgettable characters, an ingenious structure, exquisite language, Yan Lianke’s Four Books takes inspiration not only from Latin America’s magic realism and Russian naturalism, and particularly Dostoyevsky’s fascination with human suffering and glory, and I am convinced that they will increasingly become recognized as landmark achievements in world literature. Virtually all of Yan Lianke’s writings directly confront, at the level of their content, the history and reality of post-1949 China, together with questions of systems, power, and the humanity’s position under the revolution. In artistic terms, he skillfully absorbs Kafka’s absurdism as well as America’s black humor, while at the level of his structure and narrative he repeatedly reinvents himself, overturning readers’ assumptions and expectations. These qualities have combined to make Yan Lianke one of contemporary China’s most distinctive and celebrated authors.