AUTHOR: Yu Hua (translated by Allan Barr)

Word on smart people street is that Chinese writer Yu Hua is edging closer and closer to a Nobel nomination. Thankfully for Western audiences, there is already a rich body of texts floating around, rendered by excellent translators, of which “Chronicle of a Blood Merchant” and “To Live” are the most well-known. “Cries in the Drizzle” is the latest batch of his writings to wash up on English language shores. It’s not as narrative as the two well-known novels, which makes sense considering that the series of sad vignettes sketching the outlines of the child Sun Guanglin in “Cries” were serialized way back in 1991, before Yu got narrative religion. From the murk, terror and “biantai” behavior characteristic of Yu Hua at his freest emerges a portrait of an unwanted kid growing up in Mao’s China who bounces from one tragedy to another. His parents don’t want him, his adoptive father commits suicide and everyone around him harbors a terrible pathology of some kind—be it psycho or sexual. Yu Hua is a literary man in the vein of William Faulkner and maybe Kafka, so the larger meanings are elusive, not allusive. Politics are not really his game, human suffering, however, most definitely is. 320 pages