MCLC: Civil Servant's Notebook (1,2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From:  A. E. Clark <aec at raggedbanner.com>
Subject: Civil Servant's Notebook (1)
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I am sure I am not the only MCLC reader to be struck by ability of _The
Global Times_ to devote more than 500 words to the release of the English
edition ofWang Xiaofang's _Civil Servant's Notebook_ without identifying
the translator.  

Congratulations are in order to Eric Abrahamsen.

Andrew 

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From: Maura Cunningham <maura.cunningham at uci.edu>
Subject: Civil Servant's Notebook (2)

List members might be interested in Jeff Wasserstrom's review of The Civil
Servant's Notebook, which appeared at Time Asia

Maura

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2129420,00.html
(paywalled, but pasted below).
Mind Your Back
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

News from China this year gave new meaning to the adage that truth is
stranger than fiction. The Neil Heywood murder came right out of a spy
novel, with the accused, Gu Kailai, not only a high-profile lawyer but
also married to Bo Xilai, a controversial national-level political leader.
The tale of blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng’s escape, too, seemed conjured up
by a novelist with a vivid imagination. He was imprisoned in a house
surrounded by armed guards and high walls, and broke his leg during his
getaway, but still made it to Beijing.

It’s a third news story, however, related to the Heywood case, that
Chinese readers are likely to think most resembles a novel come to life.
Bo’s expulsion from the Communist Party—and his pending trial for
graft—mirrors the plot of several best-selling “officialdom novels.” Among
these is Wang Xiaofang’s The Civil Servant’s Notebook, which has just
appeared in English.

In novels of this kind, skilled players of political games rise within a
cutthroat bureaucracy. (Wang knows this milieu well, having once been
private secretary to a provincial official who was later executed for
gambling millions of dollars of public money at Macau casinos.) Many
characters suffer dramatic reversals of fortune because of the machination
of rivals, betrayal by erstwhile allies, a hubristic conviction of their
invulnerability or the need by higher-ups for a scapegoat.

Commentators suggest that all those factors could have played a role in
Bo’s fall. But one key difference between Bo and his fictional
counterparts should be kept in mind. The party claims that venality and
infighting are rife only at relatively low levels of the bureaucracy.
Cognizant of that, Wang, like other novelists who want their work to be
published in China, knows better than to set his tales of malfeasance at
the rarefied altitudes to which Bo ascended. In The Civil Servant’s
Notebook, the brass ring being sought is a cushy post of merely local
importance.

Inevitably, because of the timing of its release, The Civil Servant’s
Notebook will be viewed through the lens of current events. That’s fine.
But much of it also veers off into the timelessly absurd. A dizzying array
of narrators moves the action toward a climax in which some strivers rise
and one key figure is sentenced to death. The most surreal chapters are
narrated by inanimate objects. The book ends, for example, with the musing
of the Government Car, happy to reveal what passengers say when they think
only trusted confidants can hear.

My favorite chapter is made up of a dialogue between the Stapler and the
Staple. The former is self-confident and quotes Hegel; the latter, which
knows it will be destroyed if it does not stay perfectly in line, alludes
to Kundera. It’s fanciful terrain, yet one worth pondering in light of
Bo’s real-life fate.

Bo is accused of taking unfair advantage of his position as party head of
the mega-city of Chongqing. He fell, though, partly because his showy,
self-aggrandizing style diverged so sharply from the conformist behavior
expected of party leaders. In today’s China, even Staplers are expected to
act at times like Staples.