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I really struggled through this one. In fact, I took me the whole month to make myself finish when I usually read at least two or three books a month. I should have left it unfinished and moved on but my bookclub was reading Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, also by Sijie, which I had already read, and I wanted to read something by the same author to contribute. Then I missed the meeting! Balzac was much better.

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slow-paced

Loveable characters? It's complicated

3.0

Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch (Le Complexe de Di) by Chinese author Dai Sijie is the story of a devotee of Freud and Lacan who after over a decade aboard on scholarship in France returns to his homeland of China. Mr. Muo embarks on train or bicycle along with attempts at likewise traveling the unconscious of himself and a motely list of others he meets. However, psychoanalysis was in sharp decline by both the period Mr. Muo becomes enraptured by it and especially the time the book was written in 2003. Much of Freud’s theories have been reconsidered along with shifts too around Lacanianism. So, these are another aspect that situates Mr. Muo out of step in the contemporary world and a changed China. The uncomfortable obsession with virginity, both pertaining to its hapless middle-aged main character and the seedy task set him by a corrupt Judge Di who can free the political prisoner that is Muo’s love— if Muo can deliver the Judge a youthful virgin, at first blush yet one more. (Many cultures still prize such to harmful lengths.) This award-winning novel has something to say about both humans and the country its author who lived through the Cultural Revolution and similarly left for France as one might expect. Although it can read like it may be missing the mirth in the same way translated English title loses the pun. Translated in English by Ina Rilke, try and find the audiobook performed by Chinese American actor B.D. Wong to aid the shambling non-linear trip through this book.

Content Warnings