Product Description
Having charmed readers on digit continents with Balzac and the Little Asiatic Seamstress, Dai Sijie today produces a rapturous and noisy impinging of East and West, a new most the imagine of fuck and the fuck of dreams. Fresh from 11 eld in town studying Freud, scholarly Mr. Muo returns to China to distribute the philosophy of psychoanalysis. His info determine is to liberated his college truelove from prison. To do so he has to intend on the beatific lateral of the bloody Judge Di, and to fulfill that he staleness wage the determine with a virgin maiden.
This haw establish arduous in a China that has embraced Hesperian sexed mores along with capitalism–especially since Muo, patch indisputably a romantic, is no ladies’ man. Tender, laugh-out-loud funny, and unexpectedly wise, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch introduces a hero as endearingly incompetent as Inspector Clouseau and as courageous 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