The April 3rd Incident: Stories
About
The early stories of Yu Hua, written before To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant made him famous, and far stranger than anything that came after. A man is convinced he committed a crime on April 3rd but cannot remember what it was. A river runs backward. A teenager observes the world with the detached precision of someone who hasn't yet learned what feelings are supposed to accompany what he sees. These stories show Yu Hua working in an experimental, avant-garde mode that owes as much to Kafka and Borges as to Chinese literary tradition. The prose is controlled, unsettling, and occasionally hallucinatory — the work of a writer discovering what he can do before deciding what he should. Essential early work from one of China's most important living writers — before the realism, there was this.
