Dai Sijie's "Mr Muo's Travelling Couch"

No plate, no bowl, just a rectangular polystyrene box containing pieces of fried chicken, squid in red-pepper sauce and a serving of fried noodles swimming in oil, all of it cold. Cheap, too: five yuan the lot, a glass of soy milk included. Cheaper than a Métro ticket in Paris. Affordable for a man on the run. The chicken tastes of nothing at all. A disaster. He samples the fried squid, which is even worse. He chews furiously, but can't get through the hard, leathery substance. Hearing the pre-announcement crackle of the loudspeaker system, he pricks up his ears. It is a message for one Mao, a name not unlike his own. The squid meat gives up its resistance at last, whereupon he masticates it like chewing gum. Suddenly something changes in his mouth. 'What on earth?' he exclaims under his breath. He feels as if the inside of his mouth is no longer his, as if he has entered a phase that a historian or biographer would call 'post-squid'. A gap? Minutely, his tongue explores each tooth in turn: one of his incisors has gone.'

(Dai Sijie Mr Muo's Travelling Couch, pg 175; Vintage 2006)

It's been a while - what feels like years but in truth can't be more than three or four months - since I last read a book merely for the fun and enjoyment of it. Such is university, especially in my field where reading becomes a job.

Therefore the mere act of picking up this book was a joy in itself, because I knew I had no obligation of reading it, that I could just sit back and enjoy. I bought it some time last autumn, in a phase in my life when I spent far too much time and money in book shops, buying things I didn't need or have time to read. Its turquoise spine had been staring at me from the bookshelf ever since, taunting, seducing. "Pick me, pick me!" it had seemed to say every time I as much as approached the shelf. It was like a puppy in need of petting, and it was about time I gave it some love.

I'm glad I did.

Mr Muo's Travelling Couch tells the story of Mr Muo, China's first psychoanalyst, and his quest for a virgin girl with whom to bribe a corrupt and perverted judge into releasing Muo's first love, Volcano of the Old Moon, from prison. With this set-up we embark upon a quixotic journey into China and, almost accidentally, Muo's self. It's a comical journey, at times fantastic and suspenseful. Underneath the black comedy and playful prose, though, ripples a darker, critical picture: satirically, it paints a view of an absurd theatre called contemporary China, corrupt, poor, and in pieces under the double pull of Communism and Capitalism, building in this sense to almost kafkaesque proportions.

Sijie's prose is delightful and inventive. Minute details, glanced at in passing, bring the book to life, whether it's a beer can rolling back and forth on the floor of a train carriage or fly-by lines such as: "Since reading Kafka's Metamorphosis, he woke with trepidation every morning." In the pull of the beautiful language, the pages just fly by.

I wholly recommend this book. It's fun and profound at the same time, and I've no doubt you'll enjoy it.

And thus endeth this commercial. Bye for now.