Playing for Thrills : A Mystery

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Reading this Chinese mystery is not unlike running with one foot glued to the ground. Perhaps it's the translation, but more likely it's the subversive quirkiness of the author, a popular Chinese novelist who has clearly devoured his hardboiled American crime novels and seen more than a few European films loaded with angst and noirisms. Maybe there was a murder 10 years ago. Dissolute narrator Fang Yan, a rebel without a cause in Beijing, does recall a woman, a job, a table full of friends and one figure sitting close by whom he can't quite identify. The authorities have picked Yan as their best suspect. He moves in panic through his beloved Beijing, always meeting people he knows, and even some who think he's someone else. Is he that someone else? Did he actually kill once? Is the man really dead? And who is the sitting figure on the far edges of his memory? The humor is dry yet clearly intentional. The cultural references are slight enough that these could be whoring, gambling, shiftless young men pretty much anywhere. Yan is a slovenly immoral drifter living on his charm and his wits-and clearly running low on both. Even if he's not guilty in this particular instance, he deserves at least some of the mental torture the narrative creates for him in a series of plot lurches drawn in equal parts from crime lore, existentialism and pure moral farce. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Narrator Fang Yan, an unemployed thirtyish writer, becomes a prime suspect in the murder of a man who disappeared ten years ago. Fang Yan seems to have blocked out the pertinent time, so he starts investigating his own background to come up with an alibi. He interrogates his joking and card-playing pals, revisits old Beijing haunts and former girlfriends, undergoes disturbing dreams, and contemplates existential questions. Once accustomed to the author's unusual style, readers should enjoy the work's distinctly foreign flavor and subtle wit.

Kirkus Reviews

It's no wonder that Fang Yan can't remember who the eighth person was at dinner that night. He was in his cups and paying more attention to his buddies, the Gao brothers, Xu Xun and Wang Ruohai, and the two group gropes, Qiao Qiao and Xia Hong. Besides, it was ten years ago—just one more night in an endless parade of nights filled with gambling and days filled with wild dreams. But now that Gao Yang's headless skeleton has turned up in a gully in Yunnan, the police are suddenly very interested in that eighth person. The other five free-living nihilists at dinner ("The kind of life we're living sucks, maybe dying's a way to spice things up") all remember seeing Fang Yan go off with Gao Yang as the pair staggered out of the restaurant—and they don't remember seeing Gao Yang again. For his part, Fang Yan has only vague recollections of that eighth person—a man in a striped shirt? the woman of his dreams? a potential alibi witness who took him into her home for eight days?—that make him look even more suspicious. And when he starts turning over every rock for Liu Yan, his dream witness, telling everyone she's his sister, it serves him right that the person he finds is a woman claiming to be exactly that—his sister. That's only the first sign that things are about to get even stranger.

Prolific Wang Shuo's first English translation, modishly hip, is an obvious poke in the eye of his authoritarian regime. But American readers may well just be reminded of Paco Ignacio Taibo's absurdist Mexican melodramas, or Stella Duffy's British punkers.