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Published in two parts, in 2005 and 2006, Brothers (Xiongdi) spans four decades of China in transition in over half-a-million Chinese characters. Critical opinion on this book, both within China and abroad, is sharply divided.
Julia Lovell, translator of Lu Xun's works, ticks the book off for its "misogyny" and "cloacal voyeurism" in her review in The Guardian.
The New York Times calls it "a strange and wonderful thing: one of the first attempts by a Chinese novelist to create a popular epic for the generation that grew up in the 'cultural revolution', came of age in the 1980s and emerged as the winners - and losers - in China's market economy".
Meanwhile, the book has crossed the 1-million mark in China alone within a year of publication.
Brothers - in which the two protagonists, Baldy Li and Song Gang, are thrown together when Li's mother and Song's father marry - is a moving opera about their roller-coaster journey through extreme reversals of fortune. Baldy Li, the brash, go-getter with an abnormal sex drive, becomes a tycoon from selling scrap; whereas the mild-mannered, artistic Song Gang, with literary inclinations, wins the heart of the most desirable woman in town, and then drives himself toward inevitable destruction trying to make her happy.
What essentially is a story of human bondage and the trials and twists of fate in a covetous and cynical society is more often talked about for its excesses. In Pulling Yu Hua's Teeth, 2006, a vitriolic anthology of anti-Yu criticisms by some Chinese critics, Brothers has been faulted for its explicit and over-indulgent sexual content, misrepresentation of facts, disrespect toward Chinese women, immoral nature and lack of compassion.
"Critics often fail to distinguish between the writer and the character he writes about," Yu says. "If Baldy Li's peeping at women's bottoms in a public lavatory, he's immoral, not me." By that same token the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov's writing of Lolita - about a middle-aged protagonist's relationship with a pre-pubescent girl - would be an immoral act, he insists.
Neither is the pornographic content, Yu says, as excessive as it is made out to be. "The images are strong rather than repetitive. People often don't read the book but pick up a comment and keep blowing it out of proportion."
In fact, Brothers is several things to several people, all at once. It could be read as a piece of uninhibited, raunchy prose, overflowing with sex, violence and expletives, or a gripping action-thriller, or a postmodernist take on the surreal dimensions of a nation caught in the throes of fast-track entrepreneurial development.
It is, as the book's English translator, Duke University academic Carlos Rojas, says, "a combination of parody and pathos that captures China's transition from high Maoism to frenetic capitalism and will be remembered as one of the most significant literary works from early 21st century China".
And it could work equally well as a deeply stirring and inspirational study in human character and how it responds to potentially debilitating crises, such as having to choose between love and kinship, easy money and back-breaking labor, death and dishonor.
As for the moral police, while Baldy Li's hunger for material success is as irrepressible as his libido, his bond with stepbrother Song Gang is heart-wrenchingly genuine and unshakeable. His integrity in the face of crisis is obdurately strong, except perhaps for the lone instance when he betrays his brother by seducing his wife.
China Daily
