Though multiple subplots fill out the book, they feel like padding. What’s wrong with this picture? Somehow, it is not sufficient to sustain the novel. Finally, Ding Hui makes more money still as a matchmaker for the dead, marrying the younger AIDS victims posthumously to one another so they won’t be lonely in the afterlife. Indeed, coffins are in such demand that soon the countryside is denuded of trees. Yet widespread mortality provides another commercial opportunity for the enterprising Ding Hui, who makes more money selling the villagers fancy government coffins. You just assumed they were dead.” The schoolhouse, run by Ding Hui’s father, is soon converted to a hospice. This first section is successfully ghoulish, as villagers bleed themselves dizzy in order to afford larger houses and electrical appliances: “Throughout the village, blood-filled plastic tubing hung like vines, and bottles of plasma like plump red grapes.”īut then the villagers begin to come down with “the fever”: “If you hadn’t seen someone in the village for weeks, you didn’t ask where he or she had gone. The novel focuses on one village, where the son of its leading family, Ding Hui, champions the sale of blood as an easy path to prosperity, pocketing a share of the proceeds for himself. Ten years on, whole villages were wiped out. He based the book on a scandal in his home province, where villagers were urged to sell their blood, unaware that the plasma with which they were injected to prevent anemia was contaminated with HIV.

Unfortunately, the nonfiction story that inspired it beats this novel hands down.

“Dream of Ding Village” is now available in the United States in an agreeably readable translation by Cindy Carter. Yan claims that he deliberately played down his implicit criticism of the upper echelons in “ Dream of Ding Village,” but when the novel was first published in Hong Kong in 2006, his efforts to slip past the censors proved to be in vain, and this book was also banned. Yet two previous novels of his, “Xia Riluo” and “ Serve the People!,” have been banned by the Communist Party.

Formerly a poor peasant from Henan province, Yan Lianke is a widely translated author based in Beijing and the winner of major Chinese literary awards.

Dream of ding village review