MCLC: Chinese fiction is hot

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Chinese fiction is hot
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Source: Business Week (10/23/12):
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-23/chinese-fiction-is-hot

Chinese Fiction Is Hot
By Christina Larson

On the evening the Nobel Prize committee crowned magical-realist novelist
Mo Yan as the first laureate living in China (outside a prison), Alice Xin
Liu, managing editor of Pathlight
<http://paper-republic.org/pubs/pathlight/2012-2/>, a new magazine of
Chinese literature translated into English, was downing homemade ale at
Vine Leaf, a Beijing bar. Her smartphone lit up with ecstatic text
messages. “But I wasn’t really surprised,” she said. “Mo Yan’s name had
been floated for a while, and in the past year the international buzz
around Chinese literature has grown really loud. It felt like it was
time.” Liu, who is 26, spent her early childhood in Beijing before moving
to the U.K. at age 7 and then back to China after college—just in time to
witness the blossoming of interest in Chinese authors.

This April, the celebrated London Book Fair
<http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/china> featured 21 invited Chinese
authors (including Mo Yan
<http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/en/Contributors/66291/Mo-Yan>) as part of
its “2012 China Market Focus.” To be sure, as Liu relates, there was “a
bit of a culture clash,” with the Chinese officials accompanying the
literary delegation usurping more podium time than the actual writers.
(“Predictably the British media had a laugh about that,” says Liu.) Yet
the book fair’s decision to showcase writers from China is indicative, she
says, of growing interest from international publishers and audiences.

“In the past, people tended to see China as speaking with one voice,
having one experience,” says Jo Lusby, managing director of Penguin Books
China. “But what [global] readers are beginning to glimpse now is the
great diversity of voices and opinions within China. It’s true that when
addressing foreigners, there can be a tendency to speak on behalf of the
Chinese nation. But in their own writing for a domestic audience, Chinese
writers show a great range of perspectives and often a willingness to
tackle difficult topics, like forced abortions and trafficking of women,
especially in novels. There’s more freedom in fiction: On one level, it’s
not true. On another level, it’s all very true.”

Lusby opened the Beijing office of Penguin, the U.K.-based publishing
house, in 2005 and has since been at the forefront of identifying
novelists whose works might resonate outside China, as well as within. In
2008, Penguin China released an English-language version ofWolf Totem, a
bestselling Chinese novel about a Beijing intellectual’s yearning for
spiritual redemption in the wilds of Inner Mongolia.

Currently, Penguin China releases about four Chinese novels in English per
year. “It used to be assumed that [Western readers] were interested in
books aboutChina, but not necessarily from China. Now that’s changing,”
Lusby says. She declined to release sales figures on individual titles,
but said: “Seven or eight years ago, there wouldn’t have been the market
to sustain what we’re doing. Today it’s a challenging business, but it’s
commercially as well as literarily worthwhile for us.” In particular, she
seeks out “the kinds of books and perspectives that only a Chinese person
could write.”

Take, for instance, the novel of political intrigue The Civil Servant’s
Notebook, published in English on Oct. 10. The author Wang Xiaofang once
worked for the vice-mayor of Shenyang—before his boss was sentenced for
accepting $1.55 million in bribes and executed in 2006. “I left politics
to begin a writing career because I could no longer continue to be a
spiritual eunuch,” Wang says. “How religion saves believers is how
literature saves me.” Based in part on his own experiences, the novel
recounts the corrupt scheming of political rivals vying to replace their
retiring boss. “My work reveals the psychic condition of politicians who
have no faith in ideals.”

The novel belongs to the distinctively Chinese genre known as “officialdom
fiction,” which the book’s translator, Eric Abrahamsen, defines as
“fiction that’s designed to reveal inner workings of Chinese society,
particularly corruption in government. It gives average people a better
handle on how decisions are actually made.”

Abrahamsen, a young American in Beijing, is a founder of Paper Republic
<http://paper-republic.org/>, a collective of literary translators that is
also co-publisher, with the state-run People’s Literature magazine, of the
translation magazinePathlight. Skillful translation—which gracefully
conveys literal meaning, the author’s voice, and interprets cultural
context—is a demanding if underappreciated art. Most literary translators
do it for love and receive only minimal outside recognition.