Death Fugue

Praise for Death Fugue:

“Sheng is working in a tradition that includes George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood and other keen critics of human folly. But if Death Fugue nods to those predecessors, it’s fueled entirely by Sheng’s own elixir of genius and rage…. It’s not an easy read, but in a crowded field of dystopian fiction, it’s destabilizing and finally enlightening in a wholly unique way….. This infinitely twisty novel couldn’t elude Chinese censors, but it still managed to slip out into the world and shout its scorching critique of the ongoing humiliation of the human spirit.”

—Ron Charles,The Washington Post

“Now a prominent novelist and a denizen of Beijing literary circles, Ms. Sheng eventually fashioned that turning point in contemporary Chinese history into a stomach-churning, exuberantly written allegory, Death Fugue, which recalls Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”

—Jane Perlez,The New York Times

“Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue is an audacious challenge to the Chinese government’s ban on mention of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989. She imagines a pile of excrement nine stories high in the central square of a city called Beiping. The government says the pile is merely gorilla dung and hauls it away. Students protest the removal. The allegory on you-know-what could not be clearer…. She should get an A+ for moxie, and has admirers in China among readers who can get hold of the book.”

—The New York Review of Books

“No doubt the only book on the list with a ‘tower of excrement’ as part of its plot, Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue is an ironic, satirical tale set within a dystopian, authoritarian country. Banned in her native China due to the obviously allegorical references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Sheng’s absurdist novel reckons with state control, government surveillance, protest, and art’s role in effecting change.”

—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Bookstore (Portland, OR), Best New Literature in Translation

“Banned in China’s bookstores and circulating in its literary underground, Death Fugue is worth reading for its unconventional portrayal of post–Tiananmen Square China alone. When the first dozen pages suggest that the contemporary Chinese state infantilized institutions of learning, commodified faith, bestialized the public, shamed the happy, weaponized sexual promiscuity, and mechanized the human spirit—all of this following an event whose mere mention is illegal—the book feels disruptive indeed…. Death Fugue considers communism and capitalism, courage and the spirit. It is the story of one person determining how they might create a better world, of a society debating the right path forward…. Death Fugue will be all too relatable to a Western reader. Entreaties for resistance while memories of injustice remain fresh are hardly unknown here. And when Beiping’s media leans on their favorite, counter-public-opinion experts to favor the police, when unmarked vans round up peaceful protesters, or when urban and rural citizens split over the value of revolt, Keyi’s world doesn’t seem distant.”

—Colton Alstatt, ZYZZYVA

“Death Fugue is an allegorical tale, but whether it is a utopia or dystopia is beautifully unclear…. Death Fugue — through character, language and ambiguity — explores societal themes such as advancing technology, state control, individual freedom, sexual liberation and the pleasures of the natural world, allowing the reader to decide for themselves if it is hope or fear they should be feeling about the future…. Death Fugue is an allegorical tale as chilling in parts as anything by Atwood or Yevgeny Zamyatin, yet told with airy, fitful surrealism. It is a novel that admirably refuses to slip into the genre’s habit of pedagogy or proselytism, instead people are addressed before politics, living their lives under systems of governance in which they must make a choice to either accept or fight against. Banned from publication in mainland China, despite Keyi’s past success and popularity, Death Fugue is both reposeful and purposeful, an unerringly calm vision of beauty and terror.

—Simon Lowe, Full Stop

“Named after the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge,” Death Fugue takes its cues from both Nazi Germany and modern-day China. Ms. Sheng seems to have other influences, too. Parts of the novel, lush with a fecund … creativity, are reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz.... Death Fugue is … a brave book.

—Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, The Wall Street Journal

“[Death Fugue] is full of clever observations, energy, wit, imaginativeness, and endless lush, colorful landscapes that toe the line between the beautiful and the fantastical. Its absurdity, while at times wholly unhinged, is also at times exciting and funny… ”

—Amanda Calderon, Words Without Borders