For this second novel, Dai Sijie has invented a most fantastic, yet profoundly enlightening, quest set in modern China. Mr. Muo is a forty-year-old scholar and devotee of Freud who leaves France and returns to his native China to free his college love from prison. He must procure a virgin for the corrupt and sadistic Judge Di so that the Judge will pardon the woman for whom, as it turns out, Muo has harbored an essentially unreciprocated love for twenty years. This wild premise is just the starting point for Muo’s—and the reader’s—even more wild and superbly entertaining adventure across the Chinese countryside. While he scours the country for a virgin, Muo determines to practice the teachings of Freud by offering low-cost dream interpretation to the Chinese people he encounters along the way. But Muo is a novice in dream interpretation as well as in the ways of love. The results of his encounters with the Chinese women, are, therefore, laden with awkwardness, embarrassment, and, occasionally, absurdity—both in his interpretation of their dreams and in his investigation into their purity. Along the way, Muo attracts the love of an ugly older policewoman, loses his virginity to his long-time friend and neighbor, and, when he finally meets a young virgin for Judge Di, finds himself, inevitably, falling in love with her himself. No obstacle deters Muo from his quest. He battles an array of colorful and sometimes frightening Chinese characters, including the savage hill bandits (Lolo), corrupt judges and politicians, convict restaurateurs, an herbalist who observes panda droppings, and the peasants who submit to Muo’s amateur psychoanalysis. Through Muo’s expedition, Sijie spares no detail. Embellishing his acute insight into human behavior with madcap humor, Sijie philosophizes on the capricious nature of love, the confused state of modern China, and dream interpretation as a way of understanding the human state. His creation—Mr. Muo—is a tribute to supreme optimism and the tenaciousness of the individual spirit.

ISBN: 9780099470182