Published for the first time in English by
Giramondo, Death Fugue is the bold
attempt by a prominent Chinese novelist to confront the legacy of protest and suppression
which haunts her generation.
Sheng Keyi was born in Hunan province in 1973 and
lives in Beijing. Death Fugue is her sixth novel, and the second to be
published in English translation, after Northern Girls (2012). It is a brave
work of speculative fiction, a cross between Cloud Atlas and 1984, scathing
in its irony, ingenious in its use of allegory, and acute in its understanding
of the power of writing. The imagination that drives it is exuberant and unconstrained.
In a large square in the centre of Beiping, the
capital of Dayang, a huge tower of excrement appears one day, causing unease in
the population, and ultimately widespread civil unrest. The protest, in which
poets play an important part, is put down violently. Haunted by the violence,
and by his failure to support his girlfriend Qizi, who is one of the protest
leaders, Yuan Mengliu gives up poetry in favour of medicine, and the antiseptic
environment of the operating theatre. But every year he travels in search of Qizi,
and on one of these trips, caught in a storm, he wakes to find himself in a
perfect society called Swan Valley. In this utopia, as he soon discovers, impulse
and feeling are completely controlled, and every aspect of life regulated for
the good of the nation, with terrible consequences.
