Лучшие книги Яня Лянькэ

Жаркой летней ночью в небольшом китайском городке разгорается эпидемия сомнамбулизма. Люди засыпают и во сне принимаются делать то, что им больше всего хотелось сделать наяву: одни идут мстить, другие — грабить и насиловать. Бредущие сквозь кромешную тьму, они готовы преступить мораль, здравый смысл, законы и само время, чтобы воплотить в жизнь свои тайные желания. Скоро эпидемия захватывает всю провинцию, и самые страшные кошмары вырываются на свободу и управляют явью.

В настоящий сборник включены произведения крупнейших современных китайских писателей, лауреатов престижных национальных и международных премий, переведенные на многие языки мира. Один из них, Мо Янь, "объединивший с помощью галлюцинаторного реализма народные сказки с историей и современностью", в 2012 году был удостоен Нобелевской премии по литературе. Разные по содержанию, стилю и времени создания, эти произведения объединяет одно очень важное обстоятельство - они принесли авторам по-настоящему серьезный успех и определили их дальнейший творческий путь. "Папапа" Хань Шаогуна, например, до сих пор считается одним из самых загадочных произведений современной китайской литературы - своего рода "картами и шифрами" Китая. А "Прозрачная красная редька" Мо Яня признается автором лучшим из всего, что он написал. За всю историю существования повести она неоднократно редактировалась; данный перевод выполнен по одному из старейших списков. Пер. с кит. К. И. Колычихиной, Ю. С. Курако, Е. И. Митькиной, Е. Ю. Фокиной, Н. К. Хузиятовой, Е. Т. Хузиятовой.
Составитель Н. К. Хузиятова

Deep within the Balou mountains lies a small rural town populated by disabled people. Blind, deaf and disfigured, the 197 citizens of the Village of Liven have until now enjoyed a peaceful, mutually supportive life out of sight and mind of the government. But when an unseasonal snowstorm wipes out that year’s crops, a county official dreams up a scheme that will raise money for the district and boost his career. He convinces the villagers to set up a travelling freak-show, to include Blind Tonghua’s Acute Listening Act, Guess the Age of the Old Man, Deafman Ma’s Firecrackers-on-the-Ear and One-Eye’s Needle Threading. With the money, he intends to buy Lenin’s embalmed corpse from an ailing Russia and install it in a splendid mausoleum in the mountains to attract tourism to this sleepy district. However, as we all know, even the best intentions can go awry. Provocative and funny, Lenin’s Kisses melds fable, history and satire into a fantastical cautionary tale about contemporary China’s all-consuming desire for power and wealth.

From master storyteller Yan Lianke, winner of the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize and a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, The Four Books is a powerful, daring novel of the dog-eat-dog psychology inside a labor camp for intellectuals during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. A renowned author in China, and among its most censored, Yan’s mythical, sometimes surreal tale cuts to the bone in its portrayal of the struggle between authoritarian power and man’s will to prevail against the darkest odds through camaraderie, love, and faith. In the ninety-ninth district of a sprawling reeducation compound, freethinking artists and academics…

This is the story of the freewheeling love affair between married soldier Aijun and Hongmei, a beautiful young woman from his village in the Balou Mountains.

Intoxicated with one another, Aijun and Hongmei hurl themselves into their town's revolutionary struggle. Spending their days and nights stamping out feudalism, writing pamphlets and organising rallies, they become inseparable: they are the engines of history.

But as their political activity reaches new heights, so does the danger of getting caught...

Told through the eyes of Xiao Qiang, a young boy killed by his family's neighbours, this seminal novel tells the tragic and shocking story of the blood-contamination scandal in China's Henan province. Villagers, coerced into selling vast quantities of blood for money, are infected with the AIDS virus when they're injected with plasma to prevent the onset of anaemia. Whole villages are wiped out as the sickness spreads, but no one takes responsibility for the epidemic and nothing is done to care for those left behind. As Xiao tells of the fate of his village, his family is torn apart by suspicion and retribution. This searing novel relates the tragedy of one village among many and the absurdity of a situation caused and perpetuated by the Chinese government. With black humour and biting satire, Yan Lianke's novel is a powerful allegory of the moral vacuum at the heart of Communist China, tracing the relentless destruction of a community. 'I come from the bottom of society. All my relatives live in Henan, one of the poorest areas of China. When I think of people's situation there, it is impossible not to feel angry and emotional. Anger and passion are the soul of my work.' Yan Lianke

To tell the truth, religious faith is really just a matter of believing stories. The world is governed by stories, and it is for the sake of stories that everyone lives on this earth.
Yahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom.
Her days are measured out making elaborate religious papercuts, taking part in highly charged tug-of-war competitions between the faiths and trying to resist the daily temptation to return to secular life and abandon the ascetic ideals that are her calling. Everything seems to dangle by a thread. But when she meets a Daoist student called Mingzheng, an inexorable romance of mythic proportions takes hold of her.
In this profoundly otherworldly novel, Chinese master Yan Lianke remakes the campus novel in typically visionary fashion, dropping readers into an allegorical world ostensibly far from our own, but which reflects our own questions and struggles right back at us.

In this heartfelt, intimate memoir, Yan Lianke brings the reader into his childhood home in Song County in Henan Province, painting a vivid portrait of rural China in the 1960s and '70s and chronicling the extraordinary lives of Yan Lianke's father and uncles, as well as his own. Yan's parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on New Year and festival days, and as a child he dreams of fried scallion buns, and once steals from his father to buy a sesame seed cake. Yan yearns to leave the village, however he can, and soon novels become an escape. He resolves to become a writer himself after reading on the back of a novel that its author was given leave to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her book. In the evenings, after finishing back-breaking shifts hauling stones at a cement factory, sometimes sixteen hours long, he sets to work writing. A career in the Army ultimately allows Yan to escape village life, but he is filled with regrets as he recalls these years of scarcity, turmoil, and poverty. A powerful portrait of the trials of daily life, as well as a philosophical meditation on grief, death, home, and fate, and gleaming throughout with Yan's quick wit and gift for imagery, Three Brothers is a personal portrait of a politically devastating period, and a celebration of the power of the family to hold together even in the harshest circumstances.

‘One of the masters of modern Chinese literature’ Jung Chang
This gripping dystopia contrasts the reality of life in China today with the sunny optimism of the ‘Chinese dream’.
One dusk in early June, in a town deep in the Balou mountains, fourteen-year-old Li Niannian notices that something strange is going on. As the residents would usually be settling down for the night, instead they start appearing in the streets and fields. There are people everywhere.
Li

A terrible drought hits the population of a small mountain village and they flee to better climes. Incapable of marching for days, one old man and his blind dog stay behind, keeping watch over his single ear of corn. Every day is a victory over death.

With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded more than a millennium ago by refugees fleeing a seismic volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era the name takes on a new significance as the community grows explosively from a small village to a vast metropolis. Behind this rapid expansion are members of the community’s three major families, including the four Kong brothers; Zhu Ying, the daughter of the former village chief; and Cheng Qing, who starts out as a secretary and goes on to become a powerful political and business figure. Linked together by a complex web of loyalty, betrayal, desire, and ambition, these figures are the driving force behind their hometown’s transformation into an urban superpower.

Brimming with absurdity, intelligence, and wit,The Explosion Chronicles considers the high stakes of passion and power, the consequences of corruption and greed, the polarizing dynamics of love and hate between families, as well as humankind’s resourcefulness through the vicissitudes of life. 

This political satire by one of China's most distinguished authors has been banned in its native land for its depiction of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) during the Cultural Revolution. Set in 1967, at the peak of the Mao cult, when 'Serve the People' was one of the great man's most famous slogans, it tells the story of the bored wife of a military commander who artfully seduces a peasant soldier. When the lovers discover that the sacrilegious act of breaking a statue of Mao deliciously increases their desire, they compete to see who can destroy the most sacred icons of their Great Leader - smashing the commander's beloved Mao icons, ripping up the "Little Red Book" or defacing the Great Helmsman's epigrams. Defacing an image of Mao was punishable by death during the Cultural Revolution. Yan Lianke tramples on the most sacred taboos of the army, the revolution, sexuality and political etiquette. As a subversive critique of official corruption, leadership hypocrisy and the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, his book has a huge cult following in China.

Novela corta pero intensa y ?pica, que funde lo humano, la naturaleza y la muerte. Una f?bula sobre el sacrificio personal y el amor de una madre. En una peque?a aldea escondida en los montes Balou, You Sipo, una campesina local, trabaja d?a y noche para sacar adelante la cosecha mientras desespera por el futuro de sus hijos, a quienes en la aldea todos apodan los cuatro imb?ciles You. You Sipo no tiene quien la ayude, solo el fantasma de su marido la acompa?a en la b?squeda de una soluci?n a sus problemas. Un d?a, de la forma m?s sorprendente, aparece una cura para la maldici?n familiar, sin embargo, el precio es tan alto e inconcebible que tal vez solo una madre estar?a dispuesta a pagarlo. Una historia poderosa, bella y perturbadora sobre el sacrificio que acarrea asumir, hasta sus ?ltimas consecuencias, el compromiso de la sangre, de la familia y del amor cuando nos enfrentamos a las condiciones m?s adversas.  Canci?n celestial de Balou es Yan Lianke en estado puro.