The Mountain Whisperer
Translated by Nicky Harman
About
A funeral singer lies dying in a cave in rural Shaanxi, and from his deathbed he narrates four stories spanning the convulsions of twentieth-century China: revolution, land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and market liberalisation. Each era promised liberation; each created new victims. Woven between the tales are passages from the ancient Classic of Mountains and Seas, taught by a neighbouring shepherd to his son, each myth illuminating the history that follows. Jia Pingwa, one of China’s most celebrated living writers, is a master of the rural voice — his prose carries the rhythms of folk storytelling, and his perspective is always from the bottom looking up, from the village watching the capital’s latest grand idea arrive like weather. The mountain whisperer sings for the dead because someone must. The dead, after all, are the only ones who’ve seen every version of the promise.
