Book review: The Dog: Stories by Jack Livings
Disregarding his own health, and barely able to visit his dying wife in hospital, Zhou Yuqing sacrifices everything in an attempt to finish Mao Zedong's crystal sarcophagus in time for the opening of his mausoleum in 10 months' time.
by Jack Livings
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Disregarding his own health, and barely able to visit his dying wife in hospital, Zhou Yuqing sacrifices everything in an attempt to finish Mao Zedong's crystal sarcophagus in time for the opening of his mausoleum in 10 months' time.
It is a herculean task, but in late 1976, with the Communist Party the ultimate power in China, Zhou has little choice but to struggle against the seemingly impossible task demanded by his superiors, while performing weekly self-criticisms to take the blame for the regular setbacks experienced by his team.
Zhou is the main character of , the centrepiece of Jack Livings' series of short stories which, when combined, tell a powerful tale of post-Mao China.
Within the pages of Livings' debut book, the everyday struggles of a handful of Chinese men and women take on an almost poetic tone. At their core, each of the eight stories is a simple vignette, often little more than a beautifully crafted scene - yet somehow they manage, together, to reveal the plentiful contradictions at play within Chinese society.
