Dai Sijie, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch

I’m a fan of slapstick movies and literary novels, but I think this is the first time I have come across a genuinely slapstick literary novel. Muo, our poor protagonist, gets heaped with more embarrassing and/or accidental miseries than Buster Keaton on his worst day, the strangest of these probably being the earliest—in terms of page count, not plot line. (One odd aspect of the book is how freely it plays with chronology, although to little real effect.) On a night train somewhere outside of Chengdu, stretched out below his bench in an attempt to get closer to a teenage girl who has crawled under there to sleep, Muo experiences a spontaneous orgasm upon touching what he thinks is the girl’s foot but which turns out to be the handle of the broom she had used to sweep the floor before lying down.

Like much else in this entertaining book, it would take up too much space here to explain how Muo finds himself in this specific predicament. But here is the general drift: Muo, a French-trained psychiatrist, returns to his native China to bribe a judge who has the power to release his unrequited university love, Volcano of the Old Moon, from her imprisonment for anticommunist activism. The judge’s price? One night with a virgin—which explains Muo’s pursuit of the girl on the train, as well as of many other women during the course of this short, highly readable novel.

It doesn’t however, explain the orgasm, which can be put down to the fact that Muo, for no particular reason I could glean, also has a foot fetish, and that’s where I felt the slapstick detracted from the book’s larger theme, the poignancy of Muo’s yearning romanticism. Dai clearly wants Muo to be a sympathetic, well-rounded character, but there is something hollow at his center, even as Dai attempts to give him a complex interior life. I’m not quite sure why this should be. Maybe it has something to do with the lack of congruence between Muo’s inner turmoil and his role as a foil for the book’s other, much less complicated figures? Whatever the reason, a novel that could have been both touching and hilarious ends up being only the latter.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Dai Sijie