Customer Reviews

There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

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This is a book about an extremely poor village of Chinese peasants in Northern China during the Cultural Revolution. It is told through a series of vignettes that are disjointed to say the least, and English translation come across as third rate Faulkner.

The Villagers are presented as simple minded to the point of being animals, to the extent in one story at one point it is hard to tell whether a bull being castrated or a cow herd is the POV character. This is certainly deliberate. The villagers are absolutely obsessed with the most bestial varieties of sex, and spend much of the time either copulating like animals or contemplating such acts. There are multiple incidents of bestiality, incest to various degrees, and lots of really hideous unredeemed brutality. On the whole it is a disgusting book, even if certain sections manage to rise above the basest levels. Sadly these sections are often extremely cliched by the terms of Chinese fiction, but the book is short and I found it not hard to get to the end. However do not expect uplift, after this "Blood Meridian" becomes a tale of the triumph of the human spirit.

If you find profundity in the basest nature of humanity, or you can just not get enough novels about Zolaesque brutality among the peasants of Shanxi, then this book is for you. The jacket compares it to Faulkner's "Go Down Moses" and Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." It really has nothing to do with either of them, except possibly structurally. At its best, a couple of the vignettes rise to the level of the weaker Dewey Dell portions of "As I Lay Dying," which shows a certain amount of talent on the writer's part.

A Note: According to the introduction, the novel was originally written in an extremely thick peasant dialect of Chinese, so it is sort of hard to judge the original, which is here translated into the most basic English.