MCLC: Fat Years review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Lucas Klein <LRKlein at cityu.edu.hk>
Subject: Fat Years review
***********************************************************

Following is my review of The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung, translated by
Michael Duke. Published at Rain Taxi, the review is intended for a
non-specialist audience. Be forewarned: I didn¹t like the novel or the
translation.

Lucas

==========================================================

Source: Rain Taxi (spring 2012):
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2012spring/koonchung.php
 

 
 
 
 
 
The Fat Years
Chan Koonchung
translated by Michael S. Duke,
with a Preface by Julia Lovell
Doubleday ($26.95) <http://doubleday.knopfdoubleday.com/>
by Lucas Klein

The cover screams ³The Book No One in China Dares to Publish,² the
Financial Times and The Observer have offered ad-like reviews, and copies
have spilled off bookstore displays in Hong Kong and London for months;
The Fat Years is the new must-have for the politically righteous book
consumer in the English-speaking world. Consumer, that is, not reader,
since most reports mention little about the story other than its premise.
Probably better this way, since aesthetics too often fail when put up
against political righteousness.

Alas, the book is as heavy-handed as the state propaganda it criticizes,
and there is more intrigue behind the no one in ³no one in China² than
within the book¹s pages. The premise is interesting enough‹a month of
recent history has gone missing, and a small group of intellectuals and
dropouts from the Party agenda are on a mission to find out why‹but the
300-page novel offers two hundred pages of exposition as preface to a
hundred page-long epilogue.

The obvious touchpoints for such political paranoia in English and
American literature are George Orwell and Thomas Pynchon. But think of the
tense urgency of Winston and Julia running from Big Brother in Nineteen
Eighty-Four, or the slaphappy imagination of the ³eleven lost days² of the
Calendar Reform of 1752 in Mason & Dixon: instead of imaginative
allegories and dramatic development, The Fat Years reads like a failed
experiment in telling rather than showing. Questions about whether
contemporary Chinese fiction need adhere to English and American standards
have their place, of course, but since the novel refers not only to
Huxley¹s Brave New World, but also to Joyce and Proust, comparisons are
not quite cultural imperialism; nor does diversity require fans of modern
and post-modern literature in English to like this book if they read it.

In the epilogue, for instance, the three protagonists‹writer Old Chen,
vagabond Fang Caodi, and lawyer-turned-activist Little Xi‹have kidnapped
central government official He Dongsheng, and now get to listen to him
lecture on recent Chinese history and political economy. It is a captive
lecture, not a captivating one: what he says is informative, revealing,
and boring. Even the author seems to know this: ³This was certainly a
long, slow night. As Old Chen, Little Xi and Fang Caodi listened to He
Dongsheng bombard them with information, their emotions went on a
rollercoaster ride; they were totally exhausted, and yawning
continuously.² In his afterword the translator attempts to salvage this
section, saying ³Some readers may regard this as a tedious Œsoap box
monologue¹ lacking in drama, but they would be mistaken,² because the
lecture recreates ³the way the Party leadership talks to the 1.3 billion
Chinese.² An interesting tactic for a book whose primary selling point is
political virtue‹it¹s as dramatic as Party leadership lecturing the people!

A fundamental problem to The Fat Years is that the main characters are not
on the run from the government but chasing it. This is not only a problem
of plot design but of politics, as well, since instead of compelling the
reader to ask ³At what price stability?² stability itself is made victim,
and the protagonists cast as chaotic elements who threaten the only system
China knows. Such would be the political concerns, at any rate, if more
than a handful of citizens of the PRC could read the novel (expecting
censorship in the mainland, Chan Koonchung sent it only to publishers in
Hong Kong and Taiwan, so the ³no one² who dared publish the book in China
includes Chan himself); meanwhile, we Anglophone readers can congratulate
ourselves for being brave enough to oppose totalitarianism.

We will, however, have to muddle through Michael S. Duke¹s translation,
which reads like a solid second draft rushed to publication before the
editors could suggest revisions. While the plot of the Chinese version
drags, at least the sentences come in a colloquially zippy style, which
the English has not reproduced: it stumbles over Chinese forms of address,
overuses adverbs like ³certainly² and ³actually,² and is stuck in
simplistic sentence structure throughout. Compare how Duke writes in the
Translator¹s Note (³The novel posits a mystery while at the same time
offering a social and political critique of the nation in which the
mystery takes place²) with how he translates:

³This year is the year of my zodiac sign, and a lot of strange things are
bound to happen. Things like getting so worked up that I burst into tears,
or like meeting Little Xi and Fang Caodi one after the other after such a
long time‹I think all these things are vaguely connected.²

And shouldn¹t a sentence like ³After I returned to Hong Kong, I happened
to see an advertisement for property in Taikoo Shin, so I quickly placed a
down payment on the apartment I¹ve mentioned before, and started to build
a nest for two² provide either less (³After returning to Hong Kong I
noticed an ad for property in Taikoo Shin, so I made a down payment and
started building a nest for two²)‹or more (in Chinese the sentence
mentions putting down his entire savings from ten years of work)?

But even a great translation could hardly make The Fat Years compelling
enough to match its claims on political virtue. Towards the end of He
Dongsheng¹s lecture, he threatens his listeners with worse than what they
know: ³I can see that you lack the imagination to comprehend genuine
evil.² At this point, the reader will have a hard time avoiding a similar
conclusion about the novel itself: not that its author cannot comprehend
the evils of China today (evil is banal, after all, and does not require
much imagination to comprehend), but that he could not avail himself of
the imagination necessary to describe its pervasive erasure of the
historical knowledge dissent requires, as well as the necessity of acting
against it.