The Seventh Day

I've begun to read a third novel by Yu Hua, this one entitled The Seventh Day. Sadly, I've had to resort to the iPad, as no further paperback editions of Hua can be found at Gramedia. As I've said before, I don't like the 'distancing' effect of the iPad, which makes books seem somehow not like real books. To me, anyway. There is something of intimacy lost between reader and reading material. Of course, I have also had to resort to reading this in the English language, which further exacerbates the distancing effect, But oh well, I'm enjoying this novel nonetheless, which is quite different from the previous books by Hua that I've read. In The Seventh Day, we follow the wanderings of a protagonist who has just died and is not sure what to do. He knows that he must be cremated, however common folks such as he must take a number and wait their turn. Thus, he finds himself with time on his hands--I would guess seven days--which he spends in trying to determine just exactly how he happened to pass away (he doesn't remember), and connecting with the various periods of his past. The story is set in modern day China, such that we get a much different sort of narrative than in Hua's previous novels, which tend to focus on the period of the Maoist revolution. In this sense, the narrative mirrors the feeling of alienation, emptiness and dis-ease that we find in so many novels set in modern western society. One misses the sense of culture and tradition in old world China that suffuses Hua's other work, but times are what times are.