Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

“Clever and humorous … Constructed with a good deal of artfulness … Fans of the absurdity and dark humor of Milan Kundera’s portraits of life behind the Iron Curtain will appreciate these same elements in Ma Jian’s work.”

— The Baltimore Sun

“Succinct and right on target … Blistering satire.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“In Red Dust , Ma Jian gave us a dazzling portrait of life for a dissident in China. The Noodle Maker is an even greater accomplishment. Playful and wonderfully dark, it confirms Jian as a Chinese Kundera or Mrozek or Gogol. The funniest book I’ve read in a long time.”

— Philip Marsden, author of The Bronski House

“A brilliant and disturbing novel, portraying cruel, heartless deeds and a frustrated and angry people stamped down by rigid state control. In lesser hands this would all be too much, but Jian is a born storyteller, spinning tales with an almost fablelike quality. It is a most compelling read — a book I shall not forget in a hurry.”

— Publishing News (London)

“These stories reflect the changing repressive conditions of modern China …. Two friends tell each other absurd stories in which a strange cast of characters negotiate the narrow space between party rules and criminal ‘bourgeois liberalism.”

— The Boston Globe

“Mordantly satirical fiction to capture the grim paradoxes of late-twentieth-century China … Ma Jian mixes in sections of the writer’s fragmented yet utterly involving novel …. Echoing Gogol and offering an urban variation on the themes of Nobel Prize-winner Gao Xingjian, Ma Jian presents a bleak yet compelling vision of an aberrant society in which people are caught in the grip of a capricious and treacherous power and starved for kindness, beauty, and reason.”

— Booklist

“These stories, by turns surreal, disturbing, and humorous, form an eloquent portrait of that peculiar generation confused at having been nursemaided by the Cultural Revolution and then wrong footed by Deng Xiaoping’s reformist Open Door Policy.”

— The Times (London)

“Here, black comedy meets eviscerating social commentary …. Jian blends fact and fantasy with such beauty that China appears as potent a land for fiction as it is implausible for free speech.”

— V Magazine

“Entry into a different world … Humorous. Like Nikolai Gogol, Ma Jian illustrates his society’s problems by satirizing them …. The chance to hear a voice like this is a reason to love books.”

— MSNBC.com

Ma Jian is the author of Red Dust: A Path Through China, which won the Thomas Cook Prize in the U.K., and the novel Stick Out Your Tongue. He lives in England.