... a remarkable translation by Shelly Bryant ... Sheng Keyi’s book is a disorientating mix of satire and fantasy that restlessly challenges novelistic and other protocols ... through a slippery, elusive interchange between melancholy recall and shiny phantasmagoria, the intimate and the speculative, ‘those born in the 1960s in China’—to whom the book is dedicated—begin to be heard in a new way ... Sheng writes [her protagonist] as a rich portrait of the impotent potency, or potent impotency, that has made Chinese intellectuals (mostly male) ineffectual in shouldering the obligation to change their society for the better. They feel useless, and they are ... The writing is sometimes quivering, feverish, wild, given to pursuit of similitudes in a Chinese style that is here more yin than yang ... Grotesquerie, lyricism, anomie, cool humour and ironic grandiosity play together in a fugal manner, now andante, now scherzo, always returning to the vision of doom from which this world is in flight ... Plenty of Death Fugue is gorgeous, overwrought or tongue-in-cheek, as it bleeds into soft porn and sci-fi at the edges. Much of it has a shocking immediacy, especially the scenes at the Square, rendered in subtly attentive prose of gripping power. More surprising, and moving, is the eloquent urgency of the argument ... Anyone remotely interested in an insider’s untrammelled, authoritative vision of what’s going on in China will jump into this fascinating cauldron of a novel, at risk of being boiled alive.
... it’s clear early on that Sheng is working in a tradition that includes George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood and other keen critics of human folly. But if Death Fugue nods to those predecessors, it’s fueled entirely by Sheng’s own elixir of genius and rage. The result is a relentless deconstruction of the Communist Party’s insistence that society can be perfected through enlightened centralized control ... mental confusion is effectively reflected in the structure of Death Fugue, which shifts time and place erratically. The tone, too, is weirdly chaotic, sliding from philosophical conversation to moments of grotesque absurdity. To be frank, it’s not an easy read, but in a crowded field of dystopian fiction, it’s destabilizing and finally enlightening in a wholly unique way ... This infinitely twisty novel couldn’t elude Chinese censors, but it still managed to slip out into the world and shout its scorching critique of the ongoing humiliation of the human spirit.
... daring subject matter and a thinly disguised allegory for authoritarian regimes is not an automatic recipe for great literature ... Chapters alternate between Beiping and Swan Valley, and in the former Ms. Sheng adeptly conveys the headiness of youth, awash with love and politics and dreams of immortality ... Yet Swan Valley, while meant to be the more menacing state, often borders on the farcical. Interesting ideas—not least the concept of a national amnesia that allows its residents to swap personal freedom for state productivity—are undermined by an overabundance of metaphors, similes and clichés ... Death Fugue is nonetheless a brave book.
Shelly Bryant’s translation of this sprawling and chaotic novel is tireless and keeps up with Sheng’s often exhausting twists and turns ... many of the more interesting questions and details in the Tower Incident sections are glossed over, missed opportunities for deepening the world of political dissent and distrust in the novel ... Despite its length, Death Fugue doesn’t linger...long enough for us to understand Mengliu’s motivations, in part because he is too distracted by his pursuits of the various women around him ... Mengliu is in a constant state of arousal. This state yields some of the most dubious writing in the novel ... Sheng’s provocative approach could be refreshing and lighten a novel posing some very serious questions. But these passages—and there are a great many—remain unconnected to the overall political project of the book. There is only levity, when there could be much more ... It is a shame because there is otherwise so much to be excited about in Death Fugue ... There are moments of real clarity and elegance...clever observations, energy, wit, imaginativeness, and endless lush, colorful landscapes that toe the line between the beautiful and the fantastical. Its absurdity, while at times wholly unhinged, is also at times exciting and funny ... Death Fugue is long, vulgar, over the top, and addresses China’s most taboo subject. It is nothing short of ambitious and risky. But Sheng sought a provocative book, a place to say what she cannot say elsewhere ... Whether or not the reader can endure the provocation is another matter entirely.
Death Fugue is worth reading for its unconventional portrayal of post-Tiananmen-Square China alone ... the book feels disruptive indeed ... Keyi seems to enjoy writing from Mengliu’s salacious eyes, eyes that prefer to consider how a woman’s posture creates her cleavage more so than the implications of a forced miscarriage or self-immolation. Fun for the attentive reader is the special power deferred to the female characters by Mengliu’s cluelessness ... Death Fugue will be all too relatable to a Western reader. Entreaties for resistance while memories of injustice remain fresh are hardly unknown here. And when Beiping’s media leans on their favorite, counter-public-opinion experts to favor the police, when unmarked vans round up peaceful protesters, or when urban and rural citizens split over the value of revolt, Keyi’s world doesn’t seem distant.
... it’s often difficult to follow the shifts in the timeline or make sense of the plot. Sheng’s story evokes the Tiananmen Square massacre and the contemporary Chinese government’s control of day-to-day life in the country, though none of these details are explicitly mentioned, and the allegorical style leaves the characters underdeveloped. Ultimately, this feels flat.
