Mad scheme

HIDDEN BY the mountains, the Chinese village called Liven is made up exclusively of the disabled and the crippled. Of its 197 inhabitants, 35 are blind, 47 are deaf, 12 are mentally retarded and the rest are missing limbs or digits. This may sound a recipe for misery, but Liven has had one great advantage. Because it is so isolated and nobody has taken an interest in it, Liven has managed to avoid most of the upheavals that have shaken China in the past 60 years. The outside world leaves it alone.

But bad harvests bring Liven to the brink of starvation. How will the village survive without cash to buy food? Local official Liu Yingque hits on a brilliant idea. If Liven’s disabled villagers form themselves into a performing troupe, they will be able to make money by touring as a combination of acrobatic display and freak-show.

And if they make really big money, they will be able to send somebody to Russia to buy the corpse of Lenin that the Russians, who are now capitalists, no longer want. Then they will build a new mausoleum in their village. They will have a permanent income from all the tourists who flock in to gawk at the preserved Lenin.

That, at any rate, is Liu Yingque’s big scheme. In 500 pages, Lenin’s Kisses tells us how it works out, when colourful villagers such as Grandma Mao Zhi, One-Legged Monkey and Deafman Ma do or do not cooperate.

Apparently this novel caused quite a stir when it was published in 2004.

Its author Yan Lianke lives and works openly in China, but has sometimes been censored by the Communist authorities. An earlier novel of his, about Aids in China, was banned outright.

Lenin’s Kisses thumbs its nose vigorously at some of the oneparty state’s pieties. The mad scheme to buy Lenin’s corpse seems to be a way of saying that only China [and North Korea] now take the revolutionary leader’s ideas seriously, and even then, China is really in a phase of statemonopoly capitalism. So China is yoked to an ideological corpse. The way peasants literally kowtow to Party officials comes close to suggesting that, out in the country, modern China is far from being the egalitarian society its rulers want it to appear to be.

Then there are all those passages where the disabled villagers outwit, or are at odds with, ‘‘wholers’’ (the able-bodied) and Party officials.

They reminded me of nothing so much as the cunning-dumb antics of The Good Soldier Schweik and they define the huge gap between the ultra-modern China of the new cities and the persisting peasant masses.

Surprisingly, Lenin’s Kisses actually won an official state literary prize in China. Yan Lianke has found a way of circumventing censorship by making his satire playful. His chapters and his copious end-notes are given alternate numbers only (1, 3, 5, 7 etc.) as a sly way of saying he has had to leave a lot out. He winds into flashbacks the really tragic stuff about the massive famines Mao Zedong’s rule caused, and the terrors of the ‘‘Cultural Revolution’’.

This leaves most of the book free to be raucous peasant farce. And that is the way it is best enjoyed. Historian and poet Nicholas Reid conducts the weekly book blog Reid’s Reader at reidsreader.blogspot.com/