Yu Hua established a reputation as one of China's preeminent writers with To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, two novels that detail the stark and depressive landscape brought about by the Cultural Revolution. Yu's interest with the cruel circumstances of life continues with a series of short vignettes collected in Boy in the Twilight. Here, he hones his recognizable minimalist craft to comic and tragic perfection, suffusing these brutally honest, philosophical pieces with compassion and cruel twists of sucker-punching irony that take the reader's breath away.
In the titular "Boy in the Twilight," Yu pits a child thief against a hardened, middle-aged fruit stand owner in an eye-for-an-eye melodrama that unfolds in gut-wrenching misery. In "Appendix," a surgeon father tells tall tales about a doctor's skilled exploits only to find himself at great peril when he experiences the event himself and his sons expect a self-fulfilling prophecy to materialize. History repeats itself in the multi-generational drama "Timid as a Mouse," which highlights the personal violence that ensues in light of a father-son pair's non-confrontational stance.
These are everyday stories about ordinary men and women that undulate with peaks of ecstatic highs and plunge to mind-numbing lows just as the desired happy ending appears over the horizon--familiar terrain for Yu Hua, who has made a career out of the exploiting the vagaries of China's past. Yet there's an underlying, wistful hope that these individuals can evolve beyond the shadow of their cultural ghosts. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant