Death Fugue
Death Fugue
By Sheng Keyi
Translated from the Chinese by Shelly Bryant
Banned in China for its taboo allusions to the Tiananmen Square massacre, Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue is a lyrical and explosive dystopian satire that imagines a world of manufactured existence, the erasure of personal freedom, and the perils of governmental control.
Paperback ISBN: 9781632062925
Publication date: Aug 3, 2021
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ABOUT THE BOOK
One morning a nine-story tower of excrement of unknown origin appears in the center of Dayang’s capital, Beiping. The government swiftly scrubs the scene of all evidence and hands down its final word: Do not ask questions; dissent will be punished. But the crowd gathered in Round Square only grows and soon explodes in unrest. Poet Mengliu and his girlfriend Qizi join the uprising, but thousands disappear in the brutal crackdown that follows, including Qizi, the newly appointed protest leader. Mengliu abandons poetry and revolution but never gives up hope that Qizi may still be alive.
Years later, on his annual journey in search of Qizi, Mengliu washes ashore in the idyllic country of Swan Valley, a world of dreamlike beauty, perfection, and youth. But the dream becomes a nightmare as he slowly begins to unravel the secrets of Swan Valley, discovering that the perfect society exists at a deep, inhumane cost.
Boldly absurdist yet eerily prescient, award-winning author Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue barrels out of the void left by generations of state-imposed silence in modern-day China, where it remains banned from publication. It is a rogue artist’s answer to a profound question of our times: What is the role of art after atrocity?
Praise for Death Fugue
“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…. 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.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Now a prominent novelist and a denizen of Beijing literary circles, Ms. Sheng eventually fashioned that turning point in contemporary Chinese history into a stomach-churning, exuberantly written allegory, Death Fugue, which recalls Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”
—Jane Perlez, The New York Times
“From Tiananmen, Sheng’s novel moves into an imagined future one-party dystopia, a brave new world with Chinese characteristics that she calls Swan Valley. One thing the authorities did about it was to ban Death Fugue in China, but it circulates informally anyway and has been published in translation abroad. She should get an A+ for moxie, and has admirers in China among readers who can get hold of the book.”
“No doubt the only book on the list with a ‘tower of excrement’ as part of its plot, Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue is an ironic, satirical tale set within a dystopian, authoritarian country. Banned in her native China due to the obviously allegorical references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Sheng’s absurdist novel reckons with state control, government surveillance, protest, and art’s role in effecting change.”
—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Bookstore (Portland, OR), Best New Literature in Translation
“Banned in China’s bookstores and circulating in its literary underground, Death Fugue is worth reading for its unconventional portrayal of post–Tiananmen Square China alone. When the first dozen pages suggest that the contemporary Chinese state infantilized institutions of learning, commodified faith, bestialized the public, shamed the happy, weaponized sexual promiscuity, and mechanized the human spirit—all of this following an event whose mere mention is illegal—the book feels disruptive indeed…. Death Fugue considers communism and capitalism, courage and the spirit. It is the story of one person determining how they might create a better world, of a society debating the right path forward…. 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.”
—Colton Alstatt, ZYZZYVA
“Death Fugue is an allegorical tale, but whether it is a utopia or dystopia is beautifully unclear…. Death Fugue — through character, language and ambiguity — explores societal themes such as advancing technology, state control, individual freedom, sexual liberation and the pleasures of the natural world, allowing the reader to decide for themselves if it is hope or fear they should be feeling about the future…. Death Fugue is an allegorical tale as chilling in parts as anything by Atwood or Yevgeny Zamyatin, yet told with airy, fitful surrealism. It is a novel that admirably refuses to slip into the genre’s habit of pedagogy or proselytism, instead people are addressed before politics, living their lives under systems of governance in which they must make a choice to either accept or fight against. Banned from publication in mainland China, despite Keyi’s past success and popularity, Death Fugue is both reposeful and purposeful, an unerringly calm vision of beauty and terror.
—Simon Lowe, Full Stop
“Named after the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge,” Death Fugue takes its cues from both Nazi Germany and modern-day China. Ms. Sheng seems to have other influences, too. Parts of the novel, lush with a fecund … creativity, are reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz.... Death Fugue is … a brave book.
—Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, The Wall Street Journal
“[Death Fugue] is full of 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… ”
—Amanda Calderon, Words Without Borders
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© Mark King
Sheng Keyi was born in a small town in southern China and has lived in Shenzhen and Beijing. She is the author of ten novels, including Northern Girls, Death Fugue, Wild Fruit, The Metaphor Detox Centre, The Womb, and Paradise, as well as numerous short stories and novellas. Her work has been translated into a number of foreign languages and published all over the world. She has received several literary awards, including the Chinese People’s Literature Prize, the Yu Dafu Prize for Fiction, and the Chinese Literature Media Award. Her debut novel in English translation, Northern Girls, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
© Susie Gordon
Shelly Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of eleven volumes of poetry (Alban Lake and Math Paper Press), a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai (Urbanatomy), a book on classical Chinese gardens (Hong Kong University Press), and a short story collection (Epigram Books). She has translated work from the Chinese for Penguin Books, Epigram Publishing, the National Library Board in Singapore, Giramondo Books, HSRC, Rinchen Books, and Maclehose Press and edited poetry anthologies for Alban Lake and Celestial Books. Shelly's poetry has appeared in journals, magazines, and websites around the world, as well as in several art exhibitions. Her translation of Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, and her translation of You Jin's In Time, Out of Place was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016. Shelly received a Distinguished Alumna Award from Oklahoma Christian University of Science and Arts in 2017. You can visit her website at shellybryant.com
BOOK DETAILS
Paperback ISBN: 9781632062925 • $19
Publication date: Aug 3, 2021
5.5" x 8.25" • 384 pages
Fiction: China / Politics / Revolution / Dystopian / Speculative Fiction
Rights: World English excluding ANZ, China, Southeast Asia, Audio
eBook ISBN: 9781632062932
By Sheng Keyi
Translated from the Chinese by Shelly Bryant
Banned in China for its taboo allusions to the Tiananmen Square massacre, Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue is a lyrical and explosive dystopian satire that imagines a world of manufactured existence, the erasure of personal freedom, and the perils of governmental control.
Paperback ISBN: 9781632062925
Publication date: Aug 3, 2021