• Source: Beijing Coma

Beijing Coma is a 2008 novel by Ma Jian. It was translated from Chinese by Flora Drew. The Chinese government has since 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 listed as one of The New York Times "100 Notable Books of 2008".




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 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". In Bookmarks Sep/Oct 2008 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (4.00 out of 5) with the summary stating, "Even reviewers who found serious problems with Beijing Coma admired its political honesty and narrative premise".
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.




References






External links


Official Publisher site

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Strok
• Beijing Coma
• Ma Jian (writer)
• Index on Censorship
• London Book Fair
• Ding Zilin
• Dayton Literary Peace Prize
• Chinese crime fiction
• Liu Binjie
• 2012 in literature
• Independent Foreign Fiction Prize