Monkey Cup

A new and revised edition of the magical realism classic in Chinese literature, a winner of the Times Literary Award and the Kaijuan Top Ten Books. The representative work of the Malaysian Chinese literature heavyweight writer Zhang Guixing is introduced for the first time▼Editor's recommendation Zhang Guixing is a heavyweight writer of Malaysian Chinese literature who can be compared with Li Yongping. His writing is dense, gorgeous and immersive. Among the serious Chinese literary creators in Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas, there are only a handful of Chinese novelists who are as meticulous in carving text details as he is and can control an entire grand long story.
"Monkey Cup" is the final chapter of Zhang Guixing's "Rainforest Trilogy" (as Huang Jinshu calls it), following his two novels "Sylian's Song" and "Group Elephants," and is his magnum opus. He depicts his family history in a magical realist style, set against the backdrop of his hometown. The story unfolds through four generations of love and hatred, and the most striking aspect of "Monkey Cup" lies in the vivid and vibrant imagery of the rainforest. His lush prose projects violence and lust onto a variety of animals and plants, including rhinoceroses, lizards, monkeys, pitcher plants, and silk cotton trees. Transcending history and reality, he creates a legendary stage of wild violence.
Set in 20th-century Sarawak, Malaysia, "The Monkey Cup" explores the diaspora of Chinese people who left their homeland and found themselves in a "foreign land." However, Zhang Guixing's use of Chinese characters defies the norms of "Zhongzhou Zhengyun," transforming the "poverty" of his homeland into a strange and enchanting world. This contrasts beautifully with the writing of Chinese characters in mainland China and Taiwan, a region far removed from the rest of the world, offering a welcome opportunity to broaden readers' horizons in Chinese writing.
▼Brief introduction: After being fired from his teaching position, Chi returns to his hometown in Sarawak, Malaysia from Taiwan. He tracks down his sister Limei, who has disappeared with her newborn baby, and enters the rainforest. He is warmly received by the local indigenous Dayak people, and develops an emotional entanglement with the Dayak girl Yanini... Under the author's gorgeous and bizarre text, a series of bloody, dark and breathtaking grievances and hatreds involving colonists, pioneers, invaders and indigenous people, which lasted for four generations of the family, gradually emerges.
▼Celebrity recommendation: He (Zhang Guixing) is different from Li Yongping, who is also from Borneo and is very cautious about his birthplace. But like Mo Yan, who was born in Gaomi, Northeast China, he continues to refine his own dream of his hometown and throws himself wholeheartedly into the tropical rainforest of Borneo... Zhang's dream tapestry has reached a higher level. This time he has fully developed the magical realism that has not been fully developed in Taiwan but has been wasted by performers... In contrast to Mo Yan's "herbivorous family", he depicts the legend of a "pitcher plant family".
——Writer Huang Jinshu's "Monkey Cup" traces the crimes and punishments of Chinese colonists, with the time span extending to the present day... It shifts from national identity to the dialectic between race and human/sex, and interprets the threat of hybrids and incest through entering and exiting the rainforest.
Harvard University professor David Wang's "Monkey Cup" is a truly remarkable book for my generation of fiction writers, and I've also been deeply influenced by Zhang Guixing in some ways. Zhang Guixing's fiction is incredibly eerie, his knife-wielding techniques masterfully executed, the birds, dogs, snakes, and crocodiles hidden in every detail, and the camerawork that entwines the life and death of all things—all with incredible spirituality and resolution.
——Reading "Monkey Cup" by writer Luo Yijun allows us to experience the magical and cruel aesthetics of the rainforest, and it is as if we are witnessing the predatory tropical humanities. It also forces us to ask ourselves whether the hidden beast is about to awaken. Therefore, it is also a journey for readers to trace their souls back to their roots, through the stimulation of colonial desire.
——Writer Wallis Nogan In "Monkey Cup", Zhang Guixing did his best to exaggerate, using the history of land reclamation by the Chinese in Sarawak as the axis, and then densely weaving a Borneo tropical rainforest that is extremely vibrant and full of decadence and decline.
——Writer Li Xuanchun▼Award Records☆ 2001 Times Literary Award Novel Recommendation Award☆ 2001 Kaijuan Top Ten Books Award☆ 2001 United Daily News Readers Best Book AwardThe author has won:
☆ 2019 Taiwan Literature Golden Classic Award of the Year ☆ 43rd Golden Tripod Award for Literature Book ☆ 2019 Taipei Book Fair Grand Prize ☆ 15th Huazong Literary Award for Malaysian Chinese Literature ☆ Times Literary Million Novel Award Readers' Choice Award ☆ Times Literary Award for Novel Excellence and Novella ☆ Books.com.tw Annual Selection ☆ OPENBOOK Book of the Year ☆ Asia Weekly Top Ten Novels ☆ 7th United Daily News Literary Award

2020-07-01

四川人民出版社

Houlang, Houlang Literature

312

9787220118234