The Noodle Maker

The Noodle Maker

by Ma Jian (Author), Flora Drew (Translator), Ma Jian (Author), Flora Drew (Translator)

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of Red Dust, comes a virtuoso piece of 'red humour' - a darkly funny novel about the absurdities and cruelties of life in modern China. Every week, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor meet for dinner. They are unlikely friends - one of them tortured by his 'art', the other fat and wealthy from the earthy business of providing spare blood for the citizens of China. Over the course of one especially gastronomic evening, the writer starts to complain about his latest Party commission: the story of an ordinary soldier who sacrifices his life to the revolutionary cause. This is not the novel he wants to write, he tells his friend. Inside his head lives an unwritten book about the people he knows or sees everyday on the streets - people who lives are far more representative of the world in which he lives...

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 05 May 2005

ISBN 10: 009945906X
ISBN 13: 9780099459064
Book Overview: 'Playful and wonderfully dark, The Noodle Maker confirms Ma Jian as a Chinese Kundera. The funniest book I've read in a long time' Philip Marsden

Media Reviews
Compelling, inventive and bleakly funny * Big Issue *
Deep black humour...owes a debt to Italo Calvino * Daily Telegraph *
Ma's writing shines a light that is both humane and angry into some of the dustiest corners of a closed and often forgotten society * Observer *
Playful and wonderfully dark...a Chinese Kundera -- Philip Marsden
Author Bio
MA JIAN was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953. He is the author of Stick Out Your Tongue, his debut novel which in 1987 led to the permanent banning of his books in China; Red Dust, winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; four collections of short stories and essays; and six further novels, including Beijing Coma, winner of the Index on Censorship Book Award and the Athens Prize for Literature. His last book, The Dark Road, nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, saw him barred from returning to China. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He now lives in exile in London.