Product Description
Having fascinated readers upon dual continents with Balzac as well as the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie right away produces the rapturous as well as blustering incident of East as well as West, the novel about the mental condition of adore as well as the adore of dreams. Fresh from eleven years in Paris study Freud, learned Mr. Muo earnings to China to widespread the gospel of psychoanalysis. His tip role is to giveaway his college swain from prison. To do so he has to get upon the great side of the barbarous Judge Di, as well as to get ahead that he contingency yield the decider with the pure maiden.
This might infer formidable in the China which has embraced horse opera passionate mores along with capitalism–especially given Muo, whilst indisputably the romantic, is no ladies’ man. Tender, laugh-out-loud funny, as well as suddenly wise, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch introduces the favourite as endearingly unhandy as Inspector Clouseau as well as as intrepid as Don Quixote.
Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch
I have no idea what this book is all about. Completely unintelligible. The other reviews seem to have been written about some other novel. Skip it!
Rating: 2 / 5
I found the story from cover to cover charming. Mr. Muo is delightfully naive – a true everyman hero.
Rating: 5 / 5
This was one of the strangest books I have read. The Virgin’s Dilemma could have been an alternate title. If you don’t mind most of the book having to do with a very out of place man, trying to rescue his “virgin” sweetie form jail, while wrestling with his virginity and asking about the virginity of various young women he meets, this is the book for you.
Rating: 3 / 5
I listened to Dai Sijie’s first book, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, on tape and while it was good, I often found it unbearably bleak. In this second book, we get a new look at China through the eyes of Mr. Muo, who has been living in France for quite a while and who is a rather unlikely devotee Freudian psychoanalytic theories. As we travel along with him, we get to experience many of the changes that the revival of capitalism are inspiring in Chinese culture, and we also get a glimpse of how things may never change no matter where you are. This book is lighter than Mr. Sijie’s first one, with a sense of unselfconcious, self mocking that invites the reader to laugh at the unlikely but somehow never quite unexpected predicaments that Mr. Muo finds himself in as he tries to be the hero, and somehow always ends up as the jester instead.
I would recommend this book without hesitation to anyone who enjoys really excellent character driven stories. The narration is not always straightforward, and there is a sometimes dizzying array of supporting characters, but I dare you to read it and try not to laugh out loud.
Rating: 5 / 5
After having read and enjoyed Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, I was eager to gobble up another title from Sijie. Whereas I was immediately drawn into Balzac, I just couldn’t find myself ever getting into the story of Mr. Muo. It just ambled along, with infrequent glimpses of the genius I saw in Balzac. This story never gets off the ground, and the ending was very much a disappointment. Skip this one, read Sijie’s first novel instead.
Rating: 2 / 5