7.6 /10 1 Votes
Translator Flora Drew Published in English May 27, 2008 Pages 592 ppg ISBN 0374110174 Country United States of America | 3.8/5 Goodreads Language Chinese Media type Print Originally published 27 May 2008 Genre Fiction Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Ma Jian books, China books, Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Beijing Coma is a 2008 novel by Ma Jian. It is translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew. The Chinese government has banned the book. Ma has stated that he wrote the book "to reclaim history from a totalitarian government whose role is to erase it" and named the novel Beijing Coma in reference to this. Beijing Coma was nominated in 2009 for the Man Booker Prize and is one of the New York Times "100 Notable Books of 2008".
Contents
Synopsis
The book follows the character of Dai Wei, a man who awakens from a coma to discover that ten years have passed since he was shot in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The book's narrative switches between Dai Wei's time as a seemingly non-responsive coma patient to his life before his shooting.
Reception
Critical reception for the book was positive, with Tash Aw calling it "a landmark". Pankaj Mishra compared Beijing Coma with the work of writers such as Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký and Ivan Klíma. Michiko Kakutani praised the novel's translation while stating that the book "is desperately in need of editing".
Controversy
In April 2012 Ma protested the choice of China as the guest of honor at the London Book Fair. Ma used red paint to smear a cross over his face and attempted to present a copy of Beijing Coma to Liu Binjie, but was stopped by security. Ma called his Chinese publisher a "mouthpiece of the Chinese communist party" and claimed that he had been manhandled while trying to give Liu his book.