Yan Lianke’s ‘Heart Sutra’ is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself, our book critic writes.
, who won. Guessing who the Academy will pick and why is — as the odds over the years have shown — a fool's errand. But Yan does seem like an ideal candidate. A former Army propagandist in his mid-60s, he has earned global renown for his sprawling body of work, which includes a memoir, many novels and novellas, and heaps of short stories and literary criticism.
At first, his writing was met with equal warmth at home — but now his work is subject to a de facto ban tough enough that his latest novel,Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself. Yan treats the deities of China's major religions — Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and both Protestant and Catholic Christianity — as quiet, omnipresent participants in the novel's events, which range from slapstick comedy to shocking violence.
Yahui's romance with Mingzheng is both sweet and vivid but mainly it serves to draw readers into the novel. Before long, Mingzheng, guided by a creepy and powerful man known only as Nameless, gets sucked into an ill-fated search for his father, who he's long been told was a political or military leader. Without him, Yahui starts experimenting with other facets of secular life.
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