In today's The New York Review of BooksBeijing Coma by Ma Jian
Casting a Lifeline
A Review by Francine Prose
Sixty pages or so into Ma Jian's novel Beijing Coma, the hero, Dai Wei, is troubled by the memory of a harrowing anatomy lecture that he attended as a university student. Taught by "a celebrated cardiovascular specialist," the class observed the dissection of the fresh corpse of a criminal whom the government had just executed (in celebration of National Day) and whose organs had been speedily harvested for transplant.
Dai Wei's moral revulsion was tinged with personal anxiety, for this was not the first time that politics had placed a serious strain on his love life. In high school, he had been interrogated and beaten by the police for meeting his girlfriend in a cement culvert, the only place they could be alone. And now the distressing physiology lesson reminded his college girlfriend of why she had been so reluctant to obey her parents' wish that she cross the border from Hong Kong to study medicine in the brutal, unenlightened People's Republic. How she longed to go to Canada...
Read the entire review
No comments:
Post a Comment