''Thirteen Steps'' is a novel by
Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature, here meaning ''for'' Literature (), is a Swedish literature prize that is awarded annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, "in ...
winning author
Mo Yan. It first appeared in 1988 in the literary magazine ''Wenxue si ji''. It later appeared in book form in April 1989.
translated the French version, ''Les treize pas'', which was published by
Éditions du Seuil
Éditions du Seuil (), also known as Le Seuil, is a French publishing house established in 1935 by Catholic intellectual Jean Plaquevent (1901–1965), and currently owned by La Martinière Groupe. It owes its name to this goal "The ''seuil'' (th ...
in 1995.
Plot
The protagonist is a madman locked in an iron cage. He relies upon the audience (or listeners) to feed him chalk so that he can prolong his own life and spit out tales of the miraculous and inconceivable about the lives of others. Through these unreliable narrative bits and pieces, community histories are being reinvented, creating "a grotesque and unpleasant aura" as it critiques the excesses of China's capitalist development.
Reception
Bettina L. Knapp of
Hunter College
Hunter College is a public university in New York City, United States. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools ...
reviewed the French translation; Knapp stated that the author, referring to his intent to "brutalize" the people reading the book along with the characters within, "succeeds most admirably
..n unadulterated, brilliant verbal arrays."
[ According to Knapp, " macabre humor" is present.][
]
References
1989 Chinese novels
Novels by Mo Yan
Works originally published in Chinese magazines
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