Carlos Rojas’s exceptional translation makes English feel new again. Yan’s linguistic daring, and the novel’s relentless stream of provocative images and observations, create a sensuous and riveting world ... Yan’s knowledge and appropriation of revolutionary language—Mao Zedong’s poems, slogans and most famous directives, plus a heady array of literary texts, songs and propaganda from the Chinese and Soviet revolutions—is formidable. Large sections of Aijun and Hongmei’s speech are borrowed words. But Hard Like Water is neither mockery nor satire; it is a sharp, desperately moving analysis of the logic of ideology. Its mashup of literary and political texts poses the uncomfortable and timely question: how did each of us arrive at our certainties? ... The mass tragedy at the heart of this novel is not satirised or exaggerated; it is all too real ... a work that makes contradiction the heart of its syntax: every page confronts us with what is permitted and what is desired, what is myth and what is true, how one person’s liberation is another’s disappearance.

Arguably the most important of Yan’s earlier novels ... Mao Zedong’s poems, lines from model operas, Marxist dictums, and Party songs and slogans abound in this satire, leading various Chinese critics to call the book (not always approvingly) a 'dictionary' and 'museum' of revolutionary language ... In Hard Like Water, the formulaic language of the Cultural Revolution insinuates itself into the minds and mouths of the characters ... Such schizophrenic dialogue is rent by the dictates of what Geremie Barmé calls New China Newspeak. How to render in English this stilted, allusive language? Translator Carlos Rojas’s prudent solution is to sometimes italicize the stock phrases, as seen above. As he explains in a postface, it would be impractical to gloss the intertextuality, and the Chinese original did not. Two decades after the initial publication, one wonders if the resonance of Yan’s layered language might thin out even among Chinese readers, new generations of whom would also find the style arcane. In this sense, the novel will indeed serve as a dictionary or museum preserving the Maoist era’s carnival of cant ... But Hard Like Water is realistic primarily in capturing the logorrhea and hypocrisy of the times ... Scar literature’s question of moral responsibility persists in Yan’s novel. He does not absolve Gao in mass hysteria but presents him as a scheming careerist with selfish motives behind a public facade, a little megalomaniac who, far from wishing to topple the existing hierarchy, strives rather to ascend that hierarchy by talking the talk of the megalomaniac-in-chief. In Yan’s imaginative world, each of us bears at least partial burden for our words, even and especially when we are parroting those from on high. ... Crucially, however, Hard Like Water’s hero is an antihero unrepentant to the end.

Like some Bonnie and Clyde of Maoist fanaticism, Aijun and Hongmei set about smashing every bond of family and friendship in pursuit of their blood-red new dawn. Yet self-awareness, even a guilty conscience, never quite deserts this monstrous couple ... That inner conflict gives this book its pulse and point ... it reads as a vivid, even lurid, portrait of the vandalistic savagery and hypocrisy of the post-1966 Cultural Revolution itself, packed with quotations from the militant songs, slogans, poems and operas of the time — bombastic jargon that Yan’s satire undercuts. In 2021, the novel also serves as witness to a period when Chinese writers could grapple with Mao-era atrocities with a frankness that, two decades later, might be riskier than ever ... Yan captures the sheer erotic thrill of revolutionary entitlement ... Well-served by Carlos Rojas’s agile and richly textured translation, Yan makes his anti-hero a pleasure-loving sensualist. Aijun exults like some classical poet in landscapes, sunsets, seasons and the fragrant flower garden of his lover’s body. His testimony glows with intense, synaesthetic snatches of perception. Smells becomes sounds; colours turn into scents ... Aijun’s voice, lyrically impassioned yet utterly deluded, makes the misdeeds of these back-country Robespierres if not sympathetic, then comprehensible.

... dizzyingly allusive. Yan peppers the text with phrases cribbed from Mao-era songs and slogans, weaving them seamlessly into the text without attribution ... Yan writes in a quasi-absurdist style he calls 'mythorealism,' wherein the link between cause and effect is disrupted so the characters’ actions at times seem to come out of nowhere — and maybe such is life. The result for many of his works, including Hard Like Water, is a kind of ecstatic, jumpy prose. It is never really clear what draws Aijun and Hongmei to each other ... the relationship between Aijun and Hongmei feels like the union of two horny teenagers. That might be appealing when you are in the thick of such a thing in real life, but on the page it falls a bit flat. Perhaps it explains how this novel slipped past the censor.

The more you understand of Chinese history, particularly the Cultural Revolution, the more you will get out of Yan Lianke’s powerful 2001 novel ... even for Western readers who come with limited knowledge of China’s convulsions in the ’60s, offers considerable rewards ... Descriptions of their frequent sexual encounters are vividly erotic, and that sensuality is a crucial part of the book’s daring realism as it examines the kinds of desires (physical, social) that pervaded the lives of ordinary people ... succeeds in using sensuality as a means to illuminate the period’s interwoven desires, from the physical to the ideological ... By examining this intractable conflict — between freedom and containment — without flinching, Yan proves to be a social analyst of impressive power ... Rojas’s handling of Yan’s dialogue is much too clean and conventional. He misses the novel’s linguistic idiosyncrasies ... Yan’s skill at concrete description does not extend to the environment: one struggles to get a sense of the look and scale of Chenggang. But there is no gainsaying that Hard Like Water is, in English, an important book, if only because of its refreshingly sensual vision of the appeal of the Cultural Revolution. And it should be pointed out to American readers that, in our era of heightened political tensions, with conservatives and progressives polarized, the experience of an ambitious Chinese revolutionary convinced of his correctness has much to tell us about ourselves.

... a difficult but fascinating work, a novel in which the reader is constantly urged to measure the discrepancy between what’s being said and what’s happening ... The fretful reader is left to shadowbox with their own preconceptions ... Jonathan Swift said satire is a mirror in which we see everyone’s features but our own. Some will be eager to see the faces of their ideological foes in the brainwashed features of the star-crossed revolutionaries — their pitiless self-advancement and disregard for those who stand in their way. It’s easy to look at insanity and see everyone else. Yan’s challenge, to his samizdat readers in China and those beyond, is to look in the murky glass of ambition and self-deception and find the face that resembles their own.

Filled with snippets of political propaganda, Yan’s book displays the degree of risk one may be willing to undertake, and the hardships one may endure, when striving to overcome oppression with hopes of personal gain. It’s a story of lust and greed, with a degree of tediousness in the repetition and number of passages about Aijun and Hongmei’s desire for each other, as well as all the political references. The plot is far-fetched at times; at others, it’s horrifyingly realistic with violence ... Though not for general readers, this is a must-read for those familiar with Yan’s writing. His liberal use of double entendre may also appeal to readers interested in historical fiction about this period of China’s history.

Yan transplants this subgenre into the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to showcase 'the erotics of revolutionary activism' as exemplified by an impossible love story ... If not love, then certainly lust-at-first-sight ensues. Despite marriages (and children) with others, their all-consuming affair translates to impassioned revolutionary fervor that leads to suicide, madness, unimagined power, and horrific downfall. In between, the lovers’ boldness galvanizes their radical (albeit, not quite clear) demands for change. Yan’s signature biting wit creates another indelible work of bittersweet humor and sociopolitical insight.

Chinese novelist Yan sets aside the 'mythorealism' of books past to deliver a gritty, memorable story of love in a time of choler ... Their revolutionary ardor dims a touch when they run afoul of bigger party bosses, however, and Yan’s study of power and class struggle becomes, in the end, a near-classic tragedy with the subtlest of nods to his version of magical realism. Admirers of Yan’s work won’t be disappointed with this turn to straightforward narrative.

Yan probes the darkness and absurdity of Chinese society and history with a sexy satirical tale of the Cultural Revolution as wrought in a small village ... Yan’s exuberant and unflinching tragicomedy is undeniably appealing.