38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rich, Bawdy, and Fabulous -- Horatio Alger Meets Rabelais in China, February 4, 2009
BROTHERS is an absolute gem, a picaresque novel and Rabelaisian comedy of the absurd that combines Tom Sawyer and Horatio Alger with Moll Flanders and Fielding's Tom Jones, plus touches of Don Quixote and Anna Karenina. Alternately hilarious and filled with pathos, sometimes touching, other times graphically bawdy and even shockingly violent, peopled by the honest and the unscrupulous, depicting the saintliest of saints and the worst of sinners, Yu Hua's latest book presents a scathing, deeply cynical picture of modern mainland China from the time of the Cultural Revolution to the age of Viagra and plasma televisions.
As the title suggests, the story traces the life paths of two stepbrothers who form childhood bonds as close as any pair of full brothers. Devilish, sex-obsessed Li Guang, known throughout his small town of Liu as Baldy Li for his short haircuts, shows promise of being a world-class entrepreneur from an early age. In the book's opening pages, he is caught red-handed in the town latrine peeking at women's bottoms from beneath the wall separating men from women. Before being caught, he succeeds spectacularly by viewing the comely posterior of the town's young beauty, Lin Hong. He soon parlays this shameful feat into 56 bowls of house special noodles, one from each Liu town male eager to hear his detailed description of the heavenly sight. As he eventually learns, Baldy Li has unintentionally followed in his natural father's path, one that led to his father's ignominious and gruesome end in that same latrine while trying to achieve the same objective.
Song Gang, Baldy Li's more restrained and better educated stepbrother, is the handsome, shy, and sensitive son of Song Fanping. The first third of the book, originally published in China as a separate book in its own right, traces the boys' childhood during the horrific years of the Cultural Revolution. This section of BROTHERS is mostly brutal and tragic, but it lays out the formation of Baldy Li's and Song Gang's incredibly tight bond that, despite enormous ups and downs, becomes a lifelong mutual devotion to one another.
As Part Two begins, the boys have been orphaned as a consequence of Song Fanping's tragic slaughter by his own townspeople and their mother Li Lan's steadily declining health. Baldy Li matures into a brutish and not particularly handsome young man, while Song Gang grows as tall, strong, and good-looking as Song Fanping before him. Baldy desires the hand of Lin Hong in marriage and uses Song Gang in ways reminiscent of Cyrano de Bergerac, but events (and love) unfold in ways Baldy Li never anticipates. At the same time, Baldy experiences his first business success in spectacular fashion as the manager of the Good Works Factory, a public charity operation staffed by "two cripples, three idiots, four blind men, and five deaf men" making cardboard boxes. His capitalist credentials established, Baldy Li moves on, an irresistible force who builds a full-scale business empire. Others in Liu town, including the former tooth puller known as Yanker Yu and the street vendor Popsicle Wang, invest in Baldy's efforts and become fabulously wealthy as a consequence, while Song Gang struggles to make ends meet for his wife and himself in a series of jobs that are increasingly demeaning even as they exact worse and worse effects on his health. Lin Hong figures significantly throughout in both brothers' adult lives, with tragic but different consequences for both of them.
Yu Hua relentlessly portrays his country's loss of traditional values and their unhappy replacement by unprincipled greed as being as much a tragedy as any suffered by his characters, perhaps even their proximate cause. Part One's horrific events are clearly meant to be equated with the outrageous and tragic incidents in Part Two - the consequences of unrestrained, amoral capitalism are just as bad as those of the Cultural Revolution.
In Yu Hua's cynical world, good people still exist. A few, like Mama and Missy Su and Blacksmith Tong, succeed by honest hard work, but many stand quietly on the sidelines in awe of the aggressively wealthy Baldy Li. The latter two-thirds of the book traces these characters' paths through the open society created by Deng Xiaoping in 1984, often in hilarious ways. Yu Hua's touch is a deft one, insinuating into his tale countless comical jabs at Deng's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" such as Baldy Li's white BMW reserved exclusively for daytime use and his Black Mercedes for nighttime. In one of the book's longest and funniest segments, Baldy Li organizes a national beauty competition for virgins that attracts contestants with reconstructed hymens and a vendor selling two types of artificial hymens (a cheap, domestic version called Lady Meng Jiang and more expensive foreign one called Joan of Arc). The eventual contest winner, contestant #1358, is already a mother of a two-year-old, but in a marvelous parody of Beijing doubletalk, she argues that "she would always be a virgin, because she had maintained her spiritual purity."
BROTHERS is written on an almost epic scale, 640 pages. Happily, it reads like a book half its size, with never a dull page. Yu Hua has herein surpassed the already impressive heights achieved in his CHRONICLE OF A BLOOD MERCHANT. That was a 5-Star book. This one deserves twice that amount. A simply spectacular novel, crammed full of memorable characters and events and incredibly entertaining to read.
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