The Boat to Redemption

by Su Tong

Dear Comrade.

Your request is very important to us. At a future date we will give it careful attention and scrutiny.

Revolutionary greetings to you.

Disgraced Secretary Ku writes letters every day asking for a reprieve. He was banished from the Party when it was discovered he does not have a fish-shaped birthmark on his bottom and is therefore not the son of the revolutionary martyr Deng Siopang, but the issue of a river pirate and a prostitute. Mocked by the citizens of Milltown, Secretary Ku leaves the shore for a new life among the boat people on a fleet of industrial barges during the boom time under Chairman Mao.

Refusing to renounce his status as a Party official, he maintains a distance—with Dongliang, his teenage son—from the gossipy lowlifes who populate the barges of the Golden Sparrow River. One day a feral little girl, Huixan, arrives looking for her mother, who has jumped to her death in the river. The boat people, and especially Dongliang, take her to their hearts. But Huixan sows conflict wherever she goes, and soon Dongliang is in the grip of an obsession for her. He takes on Life, Fate and the Party in the only way he knows…

Raw, emotional and unerringly funny, the latest novel from the bestselling icon of Chinese literature is a profoundly human story of a people caught in the stranglehold not only of their own desires and needs, but also of a Party that sees everything and forgives nothing.

Genres: China, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Asian Literature, Asia, Literary Fiction, Contemporary

368 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2009

About the author

Su Tong (simplified Chinese: 苏童; traditional Chinese: 蘇童; pinyin: Sū Tóng; born January 23, 1963) is the pen name of Chinese writer Tong Zhonggui (童忠贵 Tóng Zhōngguì). He was born in Suzhou and lives in Nanjing.

He entered the Department of Chinese at Beijing Normal University in 1980, and started to publish novels in 1983. He is now vice president of the Jiangsu Writers Association. Known for his controversial writing style, Su is one of the most acclaimed novelists in China.

(from Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Tong

Reviews

[Emmett · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is largely about a boy who struggles with family and society at large his constant erections. History haunts him and he seems to be cursed by every action his parents took in his life when he was younger the fact that he really wants to jerk off and his dad just won’t let him. For most of the book our protagonist tries to be a good son not to masturbate and quarrels with the townsfolk who constantly badmouth his father fends off his father who is constantly examining his crotch like a creep to make sure he doesn’t have a hard-on.

While it does have its comic moments, the novel is more of a tragedy as the protagonist is forever cursed by his family history and just can’t seem to get ahead dick. This book is literally about dick. Su Tong wrote a 300+ page novel about this dude’s dick and also his dad’s dick?

Did I give it 3 stars? I did. Three thumbs up. Three cursed & painful hard-ons.

[Alta]

The Boat to Redemption by Su Tong (Overlook Press, 2011. Trans. from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt)

Although I am a strong believer in the power of the imagination, I also believe that good literature can only be born in an environment that gives us the elements necessary to transmute them into something else. A (good) writer doesn’t simply copy reality, but (s)he can’t entirely reinvent it either. What I am trying to get at is this: if, in a society, all the writers are teaching creative writing, the reality they work with is, by force of circumstance, impoverished. True, this impoverishment is due to more than one factor: one could say that the sterile, aseptic lives most of us live in Western societies—spending most of our time in front of a screen—aren't conducive to creating great works of art; of course, one could also say the opposite: that a sterile environment may trigger in us the desire to create a different world than the one we live in. No matter, one need only read literature in translation from non-Western countries to realize that the flesh of the real and the touch of history do play a role in artistic creation.

Having said this, I would rather spend all my life in an office than live in Su Tong’s China where there is no escape from history. The narrative takes place, as far as I could tell (since there are no dates) in the late seventies, in post-Maoist China. The setting: a fishing village where the population is divided into the boat people and those on the shore. The main character is a teenager—and later a young man—nicknamed Kongpi from “kong,” empty, and “pi,” ass (not the most popular boy in town). The boy and his father end up among the boat people when the father, who had been a Party Secretary, falls out of favor with the local nomenklatura. His disgrace is the result of a tragic-comic situation: having been considered until then the son of a local revolutionary-martyr (that is, a young woman who had been killed by the previous regime, and as a consequence, had been transformed into the closest equivalent to a saint—she is the object of a cult and her sculpted likeness is guarded as a precious relic), he is now declared a fraud. This ritual of a fall from grace, all too common in communism, is subjected to a sarcastic scrutiny by Su Tong: the proof of the father’s claim to fame (as the martyr’s son) is the fish-shaped birthmark on his behind. Once he is declared a fraud, no matter how often does the poor man drop his pants down to show the proof, no one believes him any more. Not only that, but, after having been unfaithful for many years, he loses his wife too. And the solution he ultimately finds to his overpowering sexual urges is…to cut off his penis. Young Kongpi himself, who has inherited his father’s urges, struggles for the entire novel with his undisciplined penis, which has a tendency to stand erect at the most inauspicious moments.

This is the background on which appears Huixian, a charming, clever nine-year-old girl, who is adopted by the boat people, and who becomes the object of Kongpi’s most secret desires. The girl turns into a beautiful young woman, who, for some time, seems to have a great future as an actress performing a Communist revolutionary, until she too, falls from grace. Huixian’s character is, actually, very complex, as this woman changes from a powerful diva into a cheap conformist, and from a beautiful woman into the closest equivalent to a redneck (she spends most of her time cracking melon seeds). Kongpi’s adventures too are endless, and one could almost call him a picaresque hero. This is an extremely captivating novel, and the translator, Howard Goldblatt, deserves special credit for an impressive translation.

[Zadignose]

I have mixed feelings about this, and though I quite liked it in the beginning, I feel rather let down by the development of the book. It seems to have enough material for a short novella, but not enough for the medium length novel that it is. The main problem is that the book 'harps,' that is, it introduces a certain small number of phrases, character conflicts, and themes, and then harps on about them too much. Themes such as "the water gourd loves the sunflower," which is intended to poetically express the conflict of a boat worker loving a person on the shore, seem like somewhat quaint, if a little strained metaphors, until they are repeated excessively. Then they become somewhat embarrassing. Granted, I understand that the author is writing through a rather naive, pathetic narrator's voice, and the humiliation of this character is intentional, but it still seems like a limitation of the author's voice, not just the character's. Besides, the limited pov of the narrator is occasionally and inexplicitly broken. I feel pretty confident that I would react the same way to this book even if I had read it in the original language. That is to say, I doubt that it is an artifact of translation.

In thinking about the book, I've compared it on different levels to Richardson's Clarissa (for its unrelenting slide into the degradation of the main character), Dostoevsky's The Idiot (for the foolish naïveté of the protagonist whom we are tempted strongly to sympathize with until we are too embarrassed to be associated with him), and Naipaul's A House For Mr. Biswas (for the coming of age of an accursed pariah, and the scathing portrayal of the society he inhabits). But unfortunately, this novel doesn't come close to approaching the greatness of those other more accomplished works. I applaud the effort, I'm happy for the best elements of the book, but I'm sorry that it's ultimately so thin in terms of content, and so inconsistent in delivering on its potential.

[Zohaib Ali · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled to finish this, I felt the book was very slow and not a lot happened. But I did feel there were some concepts which were very interesting such as the shame associated with erections and how the men were a slave to them.

[Dolf van der Haven · Rating 4 out of 5]

An underrated gem of a novel, telling the coming-of-age story of a Chinese boy during the cultural revolution. Central is his problematic relationship with his father, his mother, basically with everybody. It is crazy, humorous, but also chaotic and dragging sometimes.
Still a worthy winner of the Man Asia Literature Prize.

[Laura Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

酣畅淋漓👍🏻

[Willem van den Oever · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone familair with the work of Su Tong, the title ‘The Boat to Redemption’ might sound a bit odd. Redemption isn’t usually a theme handled within the works of this Chinese author. The man excels in stories that are mean and hopeless and yet utterly readable and fascinating.
The same can be said of this tale. It starts off with the story of Ku Wenxuan, who is believed to be the son of a revolutionary martyr, and enjoys a life of power and fortune as a secretary for the Communist Party. That is, until the faith in his heritage starts to fade and secretary Ku is disgraced and banished from the Party. Together with his son, Ku Dongliang, he joins a group of outcasts and hides away on the fleet of barges drifting up and down the Golden Sparrow river.

Faced with his political downfall, father Ku expresses his frustration on his son, creating a household ruled with restriction, anger and shame. Dongliang, feeling neither at home on the water nor on the land where he’s bullied by the other children from the village, becomes a hermit child with no way to express himself or relieve himself of his feelings. That is, until a little orphaned girl is picked up by the boat people, for which Dongliang develops an obsession that will influence him during the rest of his adolescent life.

Su Tong is ultimately telling a politically charged story with ‘The Boat to Redemption’, delivering strong critique on the way power was just as easily gained as it was taken away from people by the Communist Party. Yet by focusing on the human conflict of father and son against this brutal system, the story becomes a human drama overlaying a political parable. Su was never one to create true three dimensional characters, yet here he comes surprisingly close, especially with the father and the son. Through the story is told through the eyes of Dongliang, it is ultimately Wenxuan who steals the show; a man both mentally and physically destroyed by his own unfaithfulness and the destiny others have forced upon him, he continuously battles for the official recognition he believes to deserve for his near-sacred ancestry.

For the most part, ‘The Boat to Redemption’ is as mean and bitter a novel as one can expect from Su Tong. Sexual oppression, anger and revenge are as important a theme as they have always been in the writer's ouvre. Yet, through all this harshness, Su also manages to incorporate little moments of magic and beauty, as Dongliang and the orphan Huixian try to listen to the voices of the river and the wind, which they want to capture in empty cans strung alongside the sides of their barge.

Set against an ever changing background where politics gained an increasingly stronger grip on its people, feeding them with false hope and paranoia, ‘The Boat to Redemption’ is a book that not only contains bitter resentment and criticism for the not-too-distant history of China, but is also a mesmerizing tale of family, obsession and tragedy.

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked it.

been awhile i try to avoid fiction, and from Chinese writer. i do not know the literature world of china, and i bump into a lot of junks without research. but this one actually was listed in asian man brooker award.

i have to clarify on this, for most review strike hard on controversy with the "Erection". it was a metaphor, male's desire and egoism. One have to be suspicious when it not only `for sex, when its was unusually often quoted in book. i see it born with desire in human nature, desire for love, freedom of speech, thought, to choose etc. As you go through, the mother despised son for have "erection", father condemning and strictly suppressing his son from having "erection", while Father, himself have somehow "lost"it.

A lot of people most might put off, or may be confuse with author unrelenting about "erection" and adolescent fantasy and angst. Perhaps that is the way it is with suppress regime in any country, here we can look at the 60-70s, about the ending of revolution in China.

i am not from China, i am a Chinese descendant. My grandparent was china citizen, he migrated to Malaysia. He passed away, before i get to meet him. This book, transpired a time where my ancestor once lived. The image of the father, was men of few words, silent mean approve, and when he is angry and furious. This is very different from the west, and in which this book have a lot of that kind illustration of father son relationship.

The relationship of son & father, is age long of conflict, to look up for example and recognition while rivalry to overcome. We were not that close since i am a child. but as i grew older i began to understand him more. And this book, kind of still trigger something deep within me.

Meanwhile, author is a skillful story teller, fill in and leave adequate space for imagination. thus, you might feel its drag, i implore you to read other history title about this period of china, before start this book. you will be appreciate more on some absurdity, and author works to critic & make light to such times.

Persist, bare with the pacing, and you shall see the metaphor. The destiny of discrimination of those being fall out of favour. On land and on boat, and those origin from land to boat (father & son) and origin from boat to land (Hui Shian)

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Su Tong's The Boat to Redemptionwas nothing like what I expected. The story of a father & son in Maoist China is both intriguing and baffling. Ku Wenxuan is the son of a martyr of the Revolution and as such has lived a life of privilege – a comfy government job, a beautiful wife and a position of honor in the community. Until, one day, his status is revoked. His beautiful wife, a staunch party member who reads government propaganda over the radio, leaves him. He loses his comfy job and is banished to a barge in the Sunnyside Fleet. With him goes his son, nicknamed Kongpi, who is the book’s narrator and protagonist.

There are two key events on which the plot of Boat to Redemption hangs. The first is the father’s fall from honor. The second is the discovery of a foundling girl named Huixian by the Sunnyside Fleet. Huixian, who eventually reaches the level of D-list celebrity in their small town, is the star of Kongpi’s erotic and chivalric fantasies. And that’s about it for plot. There’s not a lot of joy in Boat to Redemption, and I didn’t find much redemption either. It’s a story about a small group of people who are frequently their own worst enemies. Despite the excellent writing, the majority of the novel plods along with not much action or forward momentum until the last one hundred pages. Then we’re invited to take a front row seat and watch Kongpi’s life unravel.

Kongpi is a sad character - socially awkward and made more so by an overbearing parent. Early on in this novel it became apparant that nothing is going to turn out good for Kongpi, and in that I wasn't disappointed.

What confused me most about Boat to Redemption was whether or not it was intended to be a satire or a farce. There are ridiculous scenes that appear meant to be funny, but much of the humor seemed juvenile and fell flat. I wonder how much of that is a cultural disconnect? Final verdict: while I struggled with Su Tong, his novel has sparked in me the desire to read more Chinese mainland fiction to determine if his writing is an accurate representation of what is the norm.

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Several Chinese novels I have read lately exhibit what I can only somewhat uncharitably call "teenage sexuality," although this may unfairly characterize the teenagers among us. I do not wish to go into this too explicitly, but will only suggest that we might draw a distinction between Yu Hua's "Brothers," with its somewhat tittering focus upon female genitalia, and Su Tong's "The Boat to Redemption," with its fascination with the peculiarities of the male equivalent. Gosh, a whole new way of classifying novels! I don't offer these observations as some religious prude: all its sexual rowdiness notwithstanding, I would happily go back to reread the "notorious" classical novel Jin ping mei (sometimes translated as "Golden Lotus"). It is the tone of these recent novels that bothers me and makes me wonder into what strangely arrested psychosexual state contemporary Chinese writers have fallen and why. Enough of that. I did eventually get over the sexual bumps, so to speak, to enjoy portions of Su Tong's work, which is well-translated by the always excellent Howard Goldblatt. Moreover, the last pages of this novel, in which the young narrator, who certainly holds the all-time "novel record" for low self-esteem (this gets tiresome too), finally redeems himself and his father by stealing a stone memorial to a fallen martyr who may or may not be their ancestor. Are the good moments sufficient to make reading these 360 pages? That depends on how fast you read. Since I'm a slightly slower than average reader, I'll grant it two stars.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stunning book cover made borrowing The Boat to Redemption irresistible. A Chinese boy growing up in Mao era China faces hardship and humiliation after his father, Ku Wenxuan, loses social status. Milltown residents believed he was a martyr's son and rescue him from an orphanage because he had a fish-shaped birthmark on his ass. That status gave him privileges and a prestigious government job. Officials decide Secretary Ku isn't the martyr's son and he exiles himself to a barge. His wife leaves, but his son, Ku Dongliang, decides to follow him to the boat. Their neighbors treat them cruelly and Dongliang's life is miserable. Everyone begins calling him, Kongpi, meaning emptier than empty and stinkier than an ass. The boat people adopt an abandoned girl, Huixian. Her beauty opens many opportunities, but she's spoiled, selfish, and lazy. Dongliang obsesses over her. Huixian continues burning her bridges and doesn't love Dongliang. Dongliang freaks out and goes on a rampage in the barber shop, where Huixian works. His father finds out and they have the worst fight. His father tries to poison himself, but fails. The love between father and son shows in the end when Dongliang tries nursing his father back to health. His tender care surprised me because I always felt like they resented each other. Intense and dramatic ending.

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[Stuart · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, the curse of the Booker nomination strikes again. The book sounded interesting.... China in the 1960s / 1970s, with an un-person working on a barge on the Golden Sparrow River. Enter a wilful orphan child, result, lots of interesting scenarios... Well, maybe. I think perhaps it lost a lot in translation, or perhaps I was the wrong audience. There were pieces of the book that were, I think, meant to be funny, but I found them dreary. In fact, I found most of the book dreary, as it describes life in Mao's China. Perhaps the original intended audience was people who had lived through that, and it may mean more to them, but for me, I was just reading it to get to the end. The book is told in the voice of a teenager / young man, who is the son of a man who had been feted in the Communist party as the son of a revolutionary martyr. Unfortunately, history has been revised, and he is no loner considered the son of a martyr, and is now an un-person; his son is now known as Kongpi, "Nobody". The book follows them, and the young girl, for 11 or 12 years up and down the river and on the shore, to the barber shop, communist party HQ, the public toilets, through the various fads of the 60's and 70's, and as I said, it's all dreary. I didn't find the writing especially interesting either, though that could be the fault of the translation. The whole thing was flat and just not interesting.

[Millie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually really looked forward to reading this book after reading about it in an article regarding Asian writers. The first half of the book was good, I was very drawn into the relationship of the main character and his infatuation with a young girl but then everything just seems to go downhill. Dongliang who provides the narrative is a bratty teenager at the start of the book but as he ages his behaviour just gets worse and it was very hard for me to carry on reading because I was reading from the point of view of someone so unlikeable. His father comes across as been pathetic and has no redeeming qualities as the story progressed. I also feel like the ending was rushed and was left on a very awful cliff hanger when as awful as the main character was in the end I feel like his relationship with Huixian was something that kept me interested in the story and I'm somewhat disappointed nothing is mentioned of that again.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a sad book in many ways-the inadequacy of the politically ruined father casts a shadow over the upbringing of his son, set in developing China, from the time of the cultural revolution, through to more recent times. Dongliang is obsessed with Huixian, and his perception of her seizes his life from adolescence to adulthood. Set on the river boats where life is basic and austere but with with an independence from the restrictions of life ashore as controlled by the Party, Dongliang tries to transmogrify Huixian, but the ultimate banality of her life after some early promise, ruins his efforts. He finishes causing the quest of his father for recognition as the son of a revolutionary hero to be drowned with the memorial to the hero, as the shrine is being demolished for a car park. It is bleak but a powerful picture of life.

[Calzean · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book started well with a parody of a communist official who has been banished for not having the correct birth mark on his bottom. The entrance of an orphaned girl into the world of the barge people also was promising. There were a couple of interesting scenes where the local officialdom created their own rules.
There was a long diversion of the orphaned girl who becomes a propaganda tool and numerous circular passages over various themes which never seemed to go anywhere. The narrator was immature, angry, hot tempered and fixated on his penis.

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel by Su Tong (author of Raise the Red Lantern) is difficult to categorize; it's sort of a coming of age story set during the Cultural Revolution. Another reviewer described it better: it's a political parable. A political parable where a life is "worth less than a shovelful of dirt" and power can bob arbitrarily, repressing and destroying. Nominated for the Booker Prize, with fetching cover art.

[Linell]

This novel started out well, read like a tragi-comic take on the Great Cultural Revolution. The problem is that the story never moved beyond the beginning set-up; the one basic joke got stale. Still, if you want to immerse yourself in the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution, you might appreciate this novel.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one started slow but I ended up really liking it, even though I'm not sure what I think about the plot. Compared to the short stories I tried by Mr. Tong, this was less surreal. I do wonder how much was lost both in the translation and my lack of context for Chinese culture, especially for the historical period covered in this book.

[Tawseef Khan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The promise of the early chapters were an inevitable letdown, as this is a novel that ends up a disappointment, going nowhere. Overly long, tiring to read, I really felt that this novel would have benefited from having at least 100-150 pages cut from it.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

KOBOBOOKS

[Victoria Law · Rating 2 out of 5]

Su Tong does an excellent job of creating characters who are terribly unlike-able.

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

weird

[Devon Flaherty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this is the first Devon-y, from-the-best-books-list book review that I have done in quite some time. (In the old days, I read mostly literary literature, with an emphasis on world and trendy.) The book wasn't actually slated to be next, but I am going to China in July, so I have started gleaning from the Asia section of the World's Best Books List. This is the first one. For what reason? It just happened that way, due to randomizing, prices, finding used copies, etc.

Su Tong is an important figure in 1980s and 1990s writing in China. He writes about a wide range of things, and The Boat to Redemption is about the Cultural Revolution. It was written during a period in Chinese literary history when literature was an experiment, and it is said that his writing in this book is less literary and more straight-forward than elsewhere. As an English-speaker, I have to take what I get in translation, anyways. Boat to Redemption won the Man Asia Literary Prize, and continues to garner general praise.

It was long. I really had to dig my nails in and keep reading, on a couple cross-country bus trips, when I would much rather have jumped over to one of the other books in my bag. It wasn't horrible, it was just clunky and long, with not very much action or even narrative arc. Also, the story is obsessed with penises. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it just is.

I also felt like I was out of my depth. This is to be expected, as I have limited exposure to Eastern literature and even Eastern culture. I have long found the East interesting, but I could not slip into the language, place, or meta-narrative in the same way I could Shakespeare or even--to a lesser extent--Latin American literature. Of course, we have the internet now, so I could do quick studies of time frame, culture, reception of this book, etc. And I also would not use that as an excuse not to read Asian literature: on the contrary, exposure will make all of this easier and more fluid with time.

Perhaps my greatest struggle with the culture was the word play. The characters' conversations always seemed to have this sarcastic and nuanced level which I was not able to completely appreciate. This played out most in humor and in debate. I just didn't seem to be finding the same things funny--or even witty--that the characters were. And arguments? This book was chock full of arguments, which made it difficult for a Westerner, since our mode of arguing and our ethics and logic would lead us to different conclusions, even different "winners." (To be fair, though, some of this was a result of socio-economic class differences, as well.)

I say it all the time, but I can't truly love a book if I can't find a character to love. Every character in this book--including the three main ones--is so deeply flawed that it is hard to root for them or even to feel sorry for them. Despite the title, there is little to no redemption in this story. Maybe The Dead-End Boat to Redemption? The Sunken Ship to Redemption? But by about three-quarters through the book, I realized that not one of the characters had grown, and that I therefore had no investment in them, at all. I despised them for being to static and yet so self-pitying.

I think that my favorite part of reading this book was just noticing the cultural differences. From basic conversation to all the little things, I enjoyed immersing myself in Chinese literature, to see what fundamental differences I could find between my world and theirs. Some stories unite the world's people, and some bring us to a better understanding of those who think, behave, or believe differently than us. This was definitely of the second type.

I just can't really recommend this book. It was long and uneventful, painted very few pictures in my imagination, and the characters did not develop, or even change at all. Even though it is considered to be a great of Chinese literature, I can't imagine there is not better. I'm going to keep reading and see what I come across.

***REVIEW WRITTEN FOR THE STARVING ARTIST***

[Robert Høgh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I Kina må man ikke se porno. Hvis du forsøger at klikke på en pornohjemmeside, siger den bare, at siden ikke blev fundet.

Det er lovligt at onanere til sin fantasi, men dine forældre flipper ud, hvis de opdager det. For det første er det ulækkert. For det andet er det spild af tid, du burde koncentrere dig om din skolegang.

Sådan har det altid været. Alt, der har med sex at gøre (bortset fra at blive gravid og få drengebørn), er beskidt og tabu i Kina.

Flodbred fortæller om en magtfuld politiker, der blev væltet under Kulturrevolutionen, fordi han var for gavmild med sin tissemand. Der var ikke den kvinde i landsbyen, der ikke havde truttet i trompeten.

Han blev dømt til et liv i fattigdom med sin teenagesøn. Sønnen skammer sig over sin far, gør sit bedste for ikke at begå faderens fejl. Fx tager han altid to par underbukser på, når han skal klippes af den smukke frisør, så han undgår at få rejsning. Han sover altid med hænderne over dynen, og han klør sig aldrig nogensinde i skridtet.

Bøger om kulturrevolutionen er deprimerende, men moderne kinesiske forfattere har god (lidt barnlig) humor. Den er lang, men bestemt værd at læse

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

People in my bookgroup really struggled with this, and in fact only two of us managed to finish it. It is "dense". Not much happens for at least the first third of the book but then the plot really gets going. I struggled through the beginning but then the hook went in and I found it more and more fascinating. Essentially it's an historical novel, set in a small riverside town in the 1960s and 70s, under the Mao regime. What kept me interested was that life wasn't what I thought it would be - less being carted off to gulags or sent to the south to labour as a peasant when you fall from grace - but instead domestic ostracism and internal banishment and what that does to people. So many themes to discuss, history, myth, the Cultural Revolution, belonging, what it means to be a man, points of view, the nature of stalking, identity ... it's a shame so much of the first third of the book is so slow. Left to my own devices I would have given this 4 stars and not 3, but didn't think that was a fair representation of the group's response to it.

[Sanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this as a cover buy. it sounded like a good romp though I never heard about the author before. the novel started of rather well but I agree with the other reviewers that the book started to drag in the middle. it didn't have enough steam for the length that it is.

I also found the main character's obsession with a little girl rather disturbing and I don't get the point of that particular part of the story (or maybe the clue was in the last 150 pages which I skim read?).

[Susana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Con los años me canso de leer novelas de hombres maduros que caen en todos los tópicos del patriarcado al tiempo que construyen una gran novela del país X. Desde luego la novela tiene mucho valor literario en sí, pero tiene ese regusto de gran novela de grandes valores contada a través de personajes pequeños en pequeños entornos que ya he leído tantas veces.

[Wenjing Fan · Rating 2 out of 5]

以前下的电子书，看到最后竟然发现只有一半。耐着性子找了后一半，耐着性子看下去。才看出些名堂。别人的书评是看不下去的，自己想到的东西才是自己的。
先想到的自然是《河的第三条岸》，有关父亲的理想、母亲的不理解和自我在超我与本我之间的徘徊。在苏童的文字里，母亲依旧是现实的化身、依旧是与父亲格格不入的。但是父亲的，似乎不是因为理想而到河上生活的，是被生活逼上去的。父亲从监狱里回来到离婚那一段，初次看对母亲这个角色还有些鄙视，再看一次满满的心疼。母亲的出身，父亲的经历，谁都没有清清白白，可谁也没有完全的过错，只是因为时事使然，才让他们不得不承受这生命的重量。//早年看的，2024年给男作者改低分

[Bogdan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Su Tong did not disappointed me. But this novel was containing a little bit too much sexual allusions to be entirely on my taste. Everything else was spot on: great story, strong characters, exotic China.

[0x179a5fywl · Rating 4 out of 5]

读完之后的感觉和主人公的绰号一样：“空屁”——虚无、纤细的悲哀缓缓萦绕。库文轩的所有举动我都能理解，他驼碑投河是“求仁得仁”，找到了自己的归宿。但库东亮的种种行为和心路历程难以带入，他为什么会喜欢慧仙，还喜欢到那么离谱的程度，他们之间的年龄差被作者忽略了吗？这种感情也很没来由。故事的时间线比较粗糙，人物的成长和发展很突然，一会儿小女孩，一会儿十八九丰满少女，周围相关性较弱的人物却还在原来的时间线里，他们却能神奇地交汇。中后段的慧仙突然乱入，比较突兀，出现和消失都很快，就是给库东亮的生活添加情节的。删掉慧仙的那条线，另外增加个短小的、更加合理的情节进来，效果会更好。