Product Description

Dai Sijie's bestselling and much loved first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, was a delightful fable. His second is a Chinese Don Quixote following the peripatetic misadventures of Mr Muo, China's first psychoanalyst. It's over ten years since Muo has visited his native China. He's been in Paris, exploring his subconscious and devouring the works of Freud and Lacan. But he knew the idyll couldn't last. When Muo hears that his his first great love has been thrown into a Chinese jail for selling a newspaper article to the foreign press, he feels he must rush home and rescue her. He returns to a China where everyone is corruptible, provided you find the right bribe. Sadly, the $10,000 Muo offers Judge Di to free his beloved aren't enough. The judge, tired of cash and cars, orders Muo to bring him a virgin girl to satisfy his sexual predilection for the unsullied. Thus begins a series of hilarious adventures as Muo goes in search of a virgin, setting himself up as an itinerant interpreter of dreams and losing his own virginity in the process. Witty, surreal, moving, wonderfully picaresque, it is packed full of stories, anecdote, incident and mishap, all resulting in a highly enjoyable satire of one innocent man's attempt to negotiate the mind-boggling maze of modern China.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2321522 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-13
• Format: Large Print
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 389 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Wong's mellifluous, theatrical voice sets the stage for this novel of Muo, a French-trained psychoanalyst who returns to his native China in search of his lost love. Finding her imprisoned by Communist fiat, Muo discovers that the only way to free her is to bring a tyrannical local judge a virgin for his delectation. Sijie's comic-romantic quest becomes a travelogue of the new China, taking in a panoply of voices, a ceaselessly chattering orchestra playing the song of life in the proto-capitalist era. Wong chooses to perform the book as an extended series of monologues, bending and playing with each word like a separate, discretely wrapped treat. Some get whispered silkily, others intoned fitfully, others yet provided with a series of intricately nuanced voices. The book becomes an opportunity for Wong to luxuriate in the sound of Sijie's words and in his own voice. Wong makes his own performance the centerpiece of his reading, and his audacious willingness to place himself at the forefront is a gamble that pays off handsomely, providing a holistic unity that elevates this audiobook over the run of its peers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Four years ago, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, its cover adorned irresistibly with red scuffed Mary-Jane shoes, introduced the novelist Dai Sijie to American readers. Like his two main characters, he had been "re-educated" in China's Cultural Revolution, exiled to a remote village to be purged of intellectualism. And while one shouldn't ascribe autobiographical footnotes to fiction, personal experience and a reportorial eye were undoubtedly driving the story.

Now comes Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch, and with it a whole new voice -- more wry, more charming and even more quixotic. Mr. Muo is a 40-year-old student of Freud, self-described as China's only psychoanalyst-at-large, a near-sighted klutz who has returned to his home country from his adopted Paris. His main mission, besides introducing 21st-century China to the blessings of psychoanalysis, is to win the release of his university love, a 36-year-old photographer named Volcano of the Old Moon, who has been imprisoned for documenting police torture.

"Love" may be an overstatement; Muo's sexual experience is confined to his notebooks, where he religiously records his dreams in the language of Molière, with the help of a Larousse dictionary. He records these dreams with something like rapture, "especially as he recalls or applies a phrase, perhaps even an entire paragraph, of Freud or Lacan, the two masters for whom his esteem is boundless."

Muo is our hero and straight man, so wonderfully earnest, stepping aside to observe himself, to excoriate and revile his shortcomings, to dream his dreams aloud. While his faith in psychoanalysis is boundless, Dai's omniscient narrator slyly deflates the science so beloved by the protagonist: "Having no French at first, Muo spoke Chinese, of which his psychoanalyst understood not a word; even if he had, he would have been hard put to cope with the dialect of Sechuan, the province from which Muo hailed."

If there's a fly in the professional ointment, it's Muo's virginity. "How can you discuss psychoanalysis if you've never made love?" a blind Parisian poet rails at our hero not long before his journey home. But he's a man on a mission: To free his beloved, Muo needs to procure a virgin for an evil judge in exchange for clemency. He sets off, a traveling shrink on a bicycle with a banner flying above his head. How fabulous, he thinks, that the Chinese character for "dream" is two vertical strokes crossed by two horizontal ones, symbolizing a bed. Above his new logo, he proclaims in red ink, "INTERPRETER OF DREAMS" followed by "PSYCHOANALYST RETURNED FROM FRANCE and SCHOOLED IN FREUD AND LACAN." His fee is 20 yuan per session, often lowered to one yuan and sometimes waived altogether if it means more referrals, more nubile candidates.

Psychoanalysis is not an easy sell in China. One reluctant pro bono patient tells him, "It was neither myself nor my late wife who had this dream, but someone who lived in our building in the southern district of Chengdu." No matter; Muo listens to the dream-once-removed, which features a severed head, and feels inspired. He tells the patient that his wife is going to die quite soon, probably of some disease of the throat.

If the father of psychoanalysis takes a beating in these pages, Cervantes takes a bow. Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch -- here's a nod to its inspired title and talented translator, Ina Rilke -- is peripatetic with a capital P. Dai is quick to point out, "Muo the incorruptible, Muo the true, Muo the knight in shining armour! Invoking the name of his own Dulcinea, he pictured her in his mind as he pedalled along the bumpy road just ahead of his dream-logo banner."

Volcano of the Old Moon, true to Dulcinea-style form, never appears as a character, and Muo's efforts to find virgins for the evil magistrate are complicated by his blank sexual slate. At the novel's end, "he is in love with four real-life -- and indeed quite estimable -- women." Expert that he is, he recognizes that his own recurring dream -- in which Volcano's cell is raided by a firing squad -- might signal, in Freudian terms, "the beginning of the end of love."

The set pieces and the slaying of symbolic dragons that line Muo's path sometimes interrupt rather than drive the story, which may be Dai's filmmaker's eye lending action to his hero's yearnings. But we keep reading Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch for its voice and wit, for the delicious turns of phrase and perfect characterizations of a naif with professional pretensions inside a "poor dreamy and dream-interpreting head." Will Mr. Muo narrow down his "polyamorous perversion" to the wholesome love of one woman? He has earned our fondest hope for a happy ending.

Reviewed by Elinor Lipman
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
This comic novel encompasses huge themes—not just political repression in China, but also love, sex, the commodification of women, and the twisting, winding roads one must take to gain self-knowledge. Reviewers concur that Sijie’s second novel is something of a picaresque; it meanders as it follows the hapless Mr. Mou’s adventures and missteps and enters into the terrain of the absurd. What reviewers don’t agree on is whether or not the novel succeeds as a whole, particularly compared to the elegant Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001). IT seems Sijie hasn’t escaped the second-novel scourge, but he’ll charm and entertain many readers nonetheless.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A Chinese Quixote with Freud as His Travel Companion
Imagine Don Quixote as a bookish, bespectacled, and hilariously naïve Chinese man named Muo, recently returned to his native country from studying in France and bent on delivering the wonders of psychoanalysis to his countrymen. Dai Sijie has created just such a character in MR. MUO'S TRAVELLING COUCH, his latest work following the surprising success of his first novel, BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS. MR. MUO is a classic picaresque tale, following its hapless hero in his misadventures (psychoanalytic, sexual, and otherwise) as he travels through Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces in southwestern China. The results are alternately comical, touching, and even tragic, and never without touches of biting satire about imperious officials, greedy and superstitious citizens, and the chaotic impact of Westernization on people's lives and dreams.

If Mr. Muo is Dai Sijie's Quixote, then his immaculate Dulcinea is a 36-year-old woman he knew from university, improbably named Volcano of the Old Moon. Muo's quest is to secure his beloved's release from a prison in Chengdu where she is being held for having given photographs of police brutality to the Western press. Our hero's ardor is made all the more quixotic by its platonic one-sidedness - Mr. Muo's idealized love is boundless, while the object of his affections has done little more than tolerate him, even mocking his behavior in public. They have shared between them little more than a single kiss, not necessarily mutually sought, in a smoke-filled professor's office. Volcano of the Old Moon's fate is controlled by the lascivious and hedonistic Judge Di Jiangui, a former marksman and military executioner who celebrated his sanctioned killings with bowls of pig's blood soup. Judge Di agrees to assist Muo in getting Volcano's release. The price, however, is not money but an evening's sexual congress with a virgin, to be supplied by Mr. Muo.

A virgin himself, Muo sets out to find a willing virgin for the old judge. Bicycles, trains, and a Blue Arrow truck are his Rosinantes, and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are his invisible but ever-present Sancho Panzas. Muo experiences a series of humorous escapades that involve interpreting people's dreams for a fee (twenty yuan, but often reduced to one or even none in the interest of gaining referrals), a marauding band of mountain highway robbers, a mysterious old man whose job in a panda preserve is to retrieve the daily feces of the single remaining panda for government monitoring, a young virgin named Little Road, and a female Embalmer (a forty-year-old virgin whose husband jumped to his death on their wedding night because he was a homosexual).

Throughout, Mr. Muo is Quixote with an Inspector Clouseau touch, fumbling every opportunity and watching his every effort collapse or backfire. His attempt to pair the Embalmer with Judge Di nearly ends with the Judge's death, and another attempt to supply the required virgin angers the Judge even further. Muo's own attempts at love are so miserable, he mistakes a broom handle under a train seat for the slender ankle of his desired. Even as the story ends, Muo meets yet another potential virgin for his never-ending quest.

Dai Sijie's story is at its satirical best when Muo attempts to assert his Westernized intellect, gained in France, over a hopelessly non-accommodating Chinese populous. His vaunted psychoanalysis techniques, and Freud's INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, are reduced to mere fortune-telling tools. His prized command of French becomes nothing more than tonal music to peasants' ears. So convinced is he that the prison authorities cannot censor a letter written in French, Muo writes a lengthy letter to Volcano of the Old Moon in his adopted second language knowing full well that she cannot understand a word he has written. On one occasion, when Muo believes he might be going crazy, he tests his sanity by recalling French vocabulary; another time, he checks for amnesia by remembering the years of Freud's birth and death. In the end, ironically, it is Muo's put-on Frenchness that saves him from a band of black-caped robbers in the mountains of Yunnan.

MR. MUO'S TRAVELLING COUCH is a gem of a short novel, a funny and touching story of a bumbling intellectual, well schooled in Freud's theories of sexuality but without experience of his own, trying to meld East with West. As Dai Sijie traces the exploits of his lovable psychoanalyst Muo, he draws wonderfully memorable portraits of the still bitter and backward lives of people deep in western China, a place where progress is measured by the inflated price Muo imagines his parents paying to compensate the State for the bullet to be used in his own execution. A few hours spent on Mr. Muo's traveling couch are indeed a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Enjoyable, funny read
"Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch" is a wonderfully amusing short novel that chronicles the adventures (and misadventures) of Mr. Muo in the pursuit of (his lover's) freedom. I thought the whole premise of a virginal Freudian scholar in a quest for a virgin as sacrifice to appease the voracious appetite of the corrupt judge is highly entertaining. The story was beautifully written and some parts of it was so effortlessly smooth that it was poetic. There were numerous allusions and subtle references that require knowledge of the culture in question but many are of them are explained, and thus, do not hinder the enjoyment of the story. The book was an easy and entertaining read. If you enjoy the likes of Banana Yoshimoto, you'll like this too!

Journey of a Chinese 40-year-old virgin to self-enlightenment
The novel is a modern fairy tale under the disguise of a political allegory, the elements of which still bears the shadows if the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch represents a conscience - a poignant pang of conscience for social injustice. After years of studying Freud in Paris, a 40-year-old man returns to China to liberate his college sweetheart, who had taken pictures of people being tortured by police and syndicated them to foreign media, under the pretext of interpreting dreams. A corrupted judge mandated virginity of a girl in exchange for clemency from the Communist on her case. So the obsession of a greedy magistrate ensued the psychoanalyst's journey to find a virgin. The quest took him to a rural panda habitat, brought him to close encounter with the marauding hill tribe, and costed him his own virginity!

What strikes me the most about the novel is not Mr. Muo's unswerving solicitude to rescue his love from the menacing cuffs. Nor are the depiction of life and the injustice to which people are subjected during Cultural Revolution more hairsplitting than what is already known. Almost every piece of late-20th century Chinese fiction lives in the shadow of this dark period that pervades the life of Chinese people. The heart of the novel is a man's self-transformation without his knowing it. As a sense of futility hovers over every step of Muo's scheme, his tight grip on his idealism imperceptibly loosened. A reflection on his return to China that has seemed to be rueful at the first thought opened up new perspective to his life. His once unshakable faith in psychoanalytic insight began to crumble as he smugly relished the prospect of a new love. Filled with snatches of somnambulistic musings and exuberant imagination, Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch beholds the power of suggestion that enlarges one's imagination. The surface of the writing is more than a reflection of the concealed depths.