Brothers

I'm up to about page 250 of this 700 page novel by Chinese author, Yu Hua, and feeling glad that I am only a third of the way through, because I am so enjoying living with this story and its characters. Brothers is a comic, picaresque novel, after the fashion of Tom Jones or The Pickwick Papers. The unusual thing is that this comedy is set (so far) in the midst of the violence of the Red Revolution under Mau Zedong, a time of tyranny, of murder and torture, death and destruction. It manages to be comic simply by depicting people as they really are, despite ideology and grand social movements, and it gathers much of its power (for the profundity of drama is always lurking just beneath comedy) from the play of relentless love and decency against cruelty and intolerance. I don't think I've ever read anything else that has been so funny and so sad at the same time. We see that what is truly grand is not the Maoist social revolution, but the perseverance of common people through the unshakeable strength of family and love.