The Noodle Maker: A Novel [Hardcover]

Ma Jian (Author), Flora Drew (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 5, 2005

"One of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature." --Gao Xingjian, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature

From the highly acclaimed Ma Jian comes a satirical and powerfully written novel--excerpted in The New Yorker--about the absurdities and cruelties of life in post-Tianamen China.
Two men, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor, meet for dinner every week. During the course of one drunken evening, the writer recounts the stories he would write, had he the courage: a young man buys an old kiln from an art school and opens a private crematorium, delighting in his ability to harass the corpses of police officers and Party secretaries while swooning to banned Western music; a heartbroken actress performs a public suicide by stepping into the jaws of a wild tiger, watched nonchalantly by her ex-lover. He is inspired by extraordinary characters, their lives pulled and pummeled by fate and politics, as if they were balls of dough in the hands of an all-powerful noodle maker.
Ma Jian's masterpiece allows us a humorous yet profound glimpse of those struggling to survive under a system that dictates their every move.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Having "boarded the express train of the Open Door Policy," the characters in Ma's (Red Dust) satisfying, satirical novel now find themselves disembarking in a land caught between the "bourgeois liberalism" of the West and the Communist strictures of the East. Here a novelist wears nail polish ("Blood-stained hands!") as Party leaders appoint her the town's first "professional writer," while an entrepreneurial son surreally roasts his willing mother in his busy homemade crematorium. The interlocked stories that make up this work spill out over a Sunday night dinner between two argumentative old friends: Sheng, a blocked writer just one propagandist novel away from an entry in The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers, and Vlazerim, a wealthy professional blood donor. Sheng longs to write a novel based on the lives of his intimates, but the consequences of defying the Party, including demotion in professional rank and guaranteed literary obscurity, paralyze him. Instead he spends his days vociferously critiquing his neighbors' cooking as he daydreams. In these imaginings, he transforms the lives of those around him into high art, in much the same way a noodle maker turns plain ingredients into nourishing sustenance. Ma's spare meal of a novel provides an excellent counterpoint to the sumptuous lyrical banquet Soul Mountain by Nobel Prize winner and fellow expatriate Gao Xingjian.
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From Booklist

Ma Jian, an immigrant Chinese dissident and author of the acclaimed travel book Red Dust (2001), now turns to mordantly satirical fiction to capture the grim paradoxes of late-twentieth-century China. Western products and attitudes have infiltrated the rigid Communist state, but people are still not free of the party's malignant power, and the only individuals able to get ahead are entrepreneurs pursuing risky, illegal ventures, such as a well-off "professional blood donor" who regularly visits his friend, a poor "professional writer." As the two men eat, drink, and needle each other, Ma Jian mixes in sections of the writer's fragmented yet utterly involving novel, which depicts a cruel and grotesque world. Women are abused and raped. A man runs an unauthorized crematorium where he berates the dead. An actress commits suicide onstage. Echoing Gogol and offering an urban variation on the themes of Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian, Ma Jian presents a bleak yet compelling vision of an aberrant society in which people are caught in the grip of a capricious and treacherous power and starved for kindness, beauty, and reason. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (January 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374223076
• ISBN-13: 978-0374223076
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #591,551 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SIMPLY BRILLIANT!!!, January 17, 2005

By 

Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Noodle Maker: A Novel (Hardcover)

Sardonic... insightful... hilarious... satirical... curious... elliptical... Gogolesque... playful... surreal... bitingly sarcastic... cosmic... bizarre... magical... Kafkaesque... touching... disturbing... profound... hugely entertaining.

How many ways can a marvelous work of fiction be praised? Ma Jian's THE NOODLE MAKER deserves all these accolades, and more. This is a dead-on depiction of life's vagaries and absurdities in the earliest years of Communist China, yet it transcends both time and place to describe the human condition.

Set just after Deng Xiaoping's pronunciation of the Open Door Policy to modernize and open China to Western ideas and business, THE NOODLE MAKER tells the story of two friends, a professional writer named Sheng and a professional blood donor nicknamed Vlazerim. Sheng has been charged by his Writer's Association to pen a short novel about a modern-day Lei Feng, an actual Red Army soldier who died in his country's service and was effectively canonized by Mao for his supposed good deeds while alive. Not only can Sheng not think of anyone to write about, he can only think of stories drawn from his own acquaintances, people whose actions illustrate the most unconventional responses to Deng's vision of a "new China."

Most of the book consists of stories Sheng would have written had he been granted the artistic freedom. He begins with undoubtedly his best piece, the story of a young man who buys a used kiln from an art school and turns it into an upscale crematorium, complete with corpse pick-up service and a wide range of legal and illicit music for the deceased to swoon to as he or she enters the furnace. The young man and his mother become wealthy from his business, enough so that the mother decides her time has come to move on to the next life. Other stories deal with a failed actress who arranges her own, very public suicide in the jaws of a tiger, a middle-aged editor who embarks on a series of love trysts until he encounters a textile worker who won't let go, a writer of love (and rejection) letters who comes to realize that he himself can love someone, a woman whose large breasts ruin her life and career, and a painter who lives with a philosophical talking dog.

Ma Jian tells each story with panache and a wonderful sense of comic timing. His characters are absurd and their actions grotesque, yet they lovably empathetic, each in his or her own peculiar way. The characters' lives and stories are cleverly interconnected, so that as the novel unfolds, we begin to see a community, not just a random collection of individuals. At the same time, each story offers sharply satirical and wonderfully funny commentary on life in a socialist state bent on control of every detail of peoples' lives. The result is a society so full of rules, all rules are meaningless.

Some readers will be reminded by this book of DEAD SOULS, or perhaps Kafka's THE TRIAL or THE CASTLE. For me, THE NOODLE MAKER was most reminiscent of Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, a collection of short tales exchanged between Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. This is a wonderful short novel, one of the best I've read in recent years. Sadly, it may well pass largely unnoticed by the public, lacking the advertising and name recognition of far less deserving works by Grisham, Clancy, or King. That such should be the case is undoubtedly another one of life's ironies that Ma Jian's characters would have duly noted with a sigh.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and delightful, July 6, 2005

By 

Pete Trachy (Independence, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Noodle Maker: A Novel (Hardcover)

I picked up this book and read a few stories from it when my girlfriend was reading it. The writing is witty and very insightful to the workings and ironies of modern day china. I would recommend this book to anybody as being one of the best I have encountered in the last few years. It is rare to find a writer who can amuse you while being so revealing about the painful, beautiful, and absurd of a culture. I'm going to get my own copy to pass around and one for my mother too.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Read, July 2, 2006

By 

Constant Weeder "batttman" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Noodle Maker: A Novel (Paperback)

Ma Jian, Noodle Maker. 1991. New York: FSG, 2004.
The English translation of this wonderful book only came out 13 years after it was published (wisely) in Hong Kong. Its structure is a tapestry of interconnected fables ("noodles") emanating from the mind of an impoverished writer, the noodle maker. Between stories the reader is treated to hilarious colloquies between the noodle maker and his permanent weekly guest, a professional blood donor. The tales are wild and original, and reach quite deeply. They include a benign version of Animal Farm, The Lady and the Tiger, and a generous helping of anti-Communist commentary aimed at the stupid bureaucracy and forced rote memorization of patriotic songs with ridiculous lyrics, such as "Our beloved Party, you have been like a mother to me," played over loudspeakers in an attempt to break up a mob engaging in gang rape outside West Friendship Park. "Chairman Mao's Brilliance Lights Up the World" was also played. Five very large stars.