Although this book wasn't on your list for this year, I think it is phenomenal. Liao Yiwu is a poet and novelist who lives in China. After he wrote a poem criticizing the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, he was labeled as a dissident and spent four years in jail. This book is a collection of his interviews with people in China, many of whom were afraid to speak to an enemy of the state. If you have a strong stomach, there's a fascinating chapter in which he speaks to the manager of a public toilet. Turns out, the drive to express oneself is so great that the public toilets serve as a kind of community bulletin board, although people criticize each other's graffiti for being counterrevolutionary.
Great book.
~KLM
Although it doesn't seem like a pleasant topic, this sounds like a very interesting book. It's very creative of the author to use the collection of interviews with the people in China. It must create fascinating points of view !
ReplyDelete~Queen Elizabeth
The book sounds really interesting, and unfortunately, plausible. When my brother was in China recently, my mom sent an email asking about Tiananmen Square, and he emailed back telling her not to say that in an email because he could get in trouble. I can only imagine how a published poem criticizing that could have caused lots of problems.
ReplyDelete-La Reina Sofia
My book and your book both have to do with Communism. I am very interested to see how the ideas of Communism are similar and different in China and Germany.
ReplyDelete-John Wilkes Booth