Lenin's Kisses

About

Deep in the Balou Mountains, the Village of Liven is home to 197 disabled people — blind, deaf, and disfigured — who have built a peaceful, self-sufficient life far from government attention. When an unseasonal snowstorm destroys their crops, a county official devises a scheme: convince the villagers to form a traveling performance troupe, exhibiting their disabilities for paying audiences. The money will fund the official's career ambition: purchasing Lenin's embalmed body from Russia. Yan Lianke's satirical masterpiece, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, operates on a scale that is simultaneously intimate and epic. The villagers' exploitation becomes a parable for China's relationship with its most vulnerable citizens — and for the grotesque marriage of ideology and commerce. A novel that is darkly hilarious and devastatingly humane — about a country that turns its people into spectacles and calls it progress.