Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Quirky and fun. Learned a lot more about the Chinese Cultural Revolution by reading stories based on words in the Maqiao-an dictionary. Lots of superstition! Storyteller was one of the youth sent to remote villages for re-education. Good quotation from amazon.com 'A Dictionary of Maqiao is a novel of bold invention–and a fascinating, comic, deeply moving journey through the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution'. " ( )

作者在文革時期曾經在湖南一個叫馬橋的村子當知青。他統整一切馬橋人特有的詞彙，編了個「馬橋詞典」，每個詞寫一段他在馬橋和這詞與有關的回憶。基本上藉著這本書可以讀到他在馬橋所見識到的人事物、那段時期馬橋農民的生活型態、以及他自己對於各種事物的想法。照作者自己的話說，這是一本專屬於他個人的詞典。馬橋的人和故事都很有趣，我覺得長了見識，我把他常提到的那幾位村民的名字都記起來了。作者自己天馬行空對各種事物的想法我大部分都不怎麼同意，但反正是專屬於他的詞典，ok的 :) ( )

Traditional storytelling overwhelming experimental fiction

"A Dictionary of Maqiao" is a 1996 Chinese novel about a fictional village in the south of China. It takes the form of a dictionary, which is an unusual gambit for a novel. A principal precedent is Milorad Pavić's "Dictionary of the Khazars" (1984). Are there others? There are shorter pieces by Borges, Perec, and Lem, but I am not aware of other book-length dictionaries that ask to be read as novels. The model for the organization of Han's novel was possibly Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being," a novel Han translated (from the English translation, I assume), where each chapter is about a word.

1. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" as experimental fiction

A case could be made that this is one of the world's untranslatable novels, because it depends so much on local vocabulary, dialect, and phonetics. The narrator is continuously exploring differences between the Maqiao "dialect"--its pronunciation, and especially its idioms--and Mandarin from "the city." The translator, Julia Lovell, strikes a compromise by giving Chinese characters for each dictionary entry and finding English for everything else. Katherine Wolff's brief "New York Times" review (August 31, 2003) sees the book as "a meditation on the trapdoors of language and on the microhistories buried within words." Many of the stories are explicitly about language, and not character development. The entries are not in the usual Chinese "alphabetical" order, because--as a prefatory note explains--it is easier to follow the book's stories if they are disarranged. Almost all the entries are discontinuous and independent, and the majority are self-contained stories.

For all these reasons--independent pieces of fiction, arbitrarily arranged, the dictionary format, the experiment in language--the book could be read as part of postwar French-influenced European and North American fiction in the general tradition of Oulipo. But I don't think that is an adequate description, because it is overtaken by two other readings.

2. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" as political text

A look at the online reviews in English seems to indicate the book has been mainly received as a political essay. The narrator went to Maqiao as part of the Cultural Revolution, and there are many references to the futility and comedy of attempting to standardize Chinese life.

As "Kirkus Reviews" put it: "The result is a subtle and smashingly effective critique of the futility of totalitarian efforts to suppress language and thought." Or as Danny Yee puts it, the book is "a powerful demonstration of just how different a remote rural village can be—or, for the Western audience of this translation, of the diversity of China." A reader with the screen name Bjorn, on Goodreads, says the novel is "a deconstruction of the idea of ideological revolution (whether Maoist or capitalist) imposed from outside."

In these readings, Han is primarily sending a message to anyone in China who feels minorities can be safely classified and contained by a central administration. I don't think the online reviewers are wrong, and the book can be read as a critique of ideology, with the Maqiao dialect as its principal example.

3. "A Dictionary of Maqiao" as traditional Chinese narration

For me even the political reading is less central than a third reading, which would connect the book to Ming "novels" and earlier texts. Han's dictionary entries are often stories that draw morals, and in that respect they present themselves as variants on traditional sorts of Chinese fables and stories. The "Publisher's Weekly" review does a good job at conjuring this:

"A sharp, sophisticated observer, [Han] narrates... folkloric tales from the vantage point of contemporary China, situating them within a richly informative historical and philosophical framework. Among the stories that deserve mention are those of Wanyu, the village's best singer and reputed Don Juan, who is discovered to lack the male 'dragon'; of 'poisonous' Yanzao, so called both because his aged mother has a reputation as a poisoner and because he is assigned to spread pesticides (and in so doing absorbs such a quantity of toxins that mosquitoes die upon contact with him); and of Tiexiang, the adulterous wife of Party Secretary Benyi, who takes up with Three Ears, so called because of the rudimentary third ear that grows under one of his armpits."

For a while I experimented in adding titles to the dictionary entries, so that instead of single words they had brief discursive titles in the manner of older Chinese narratives. (I was thinking mainly of Cao Xueqin, and also the "Journey to the West.") Here are some examples, Han's dictionary entry first, and then my invented title:

"Tincture of iodine [碘酊]"
On the unexpected accuracy of some rural expressions.

"Sweet [甜]"
In which the narrator draws a simple moral from the observation that impoverished language leads to misunderstandings.

"Same pot [同锅]"
In which a lucky marriage helps fills the stomachs of a young couple from the city.

"Placing the pot"
On a colorful and slightly violent old custom and what it once led to.

"Qingming rain" [清明雨]"
In which the author muses on how rain stirs political memories, lost on the young.

"Rough"
In which a man appears to be a sage in disguise, but the author won't tell us for sure.

The traditionalism of the individual entries that is most prominent source of meaning for me, and it reduces both the political messaging and the linguistic experimentation to examples.

4. A note on the Afterword

The book ends with a three-page Afterword, which proposes two morals. Han begins by regretting that his Mandarin has "standardized" him. "Even the 40,000-odd characters in the Kangxi Dictionary," he writes, "have banished this enormous amount of feeling... beyond the controlling imperial brush and inkstone of scholars." However he hopes that new forms of difference (that's my 21st century term) will emerge:

"Who can say for sure, while people search for and use a broadly standard form of language.. that new dimensions in sound, form, meaning, and regulations aren't emerging at all stages? Aren't psychological processes of nonstandardization or antistandardization constantly, simulatneously in progress?"

It's a lovely and unexpected moral. The second moral is only a single sentence, and it isn't supported by the novel itself: "Providing we don't intend exchange to become a process of mutual neutralization," he writes, "then we must maintain vigilance and resistance toward exchange... this implies, then, that when people speak, everyone needs their own, unique dictionary."

That is fairly astonishing, and if Han had developed it as he wrote, the novel would have been very different.

How, then, to locate this book? According to Wikipedia, Han is influenced by Kafka and Marquez. (It's not clear if that's the encyclopedist's notion, or Han's.) Traces of Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being" are visible throughout. But Han also translated Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude," and I can't begin to guess what he got from that experience: I don't see anything of Pessoa's endless introspection, and only a few traces of his interest in the writing itself. It would be good to know more about what Han read, and whether he imagined this book as a response to postwar experimental writing, from Pavić to Oulipo.

I have given a five-star recommendation to this extraordinary book largely because of its ambition and insight, though I am not sure what its appeal would be to anyone without more than a passing interest in China. What it achieves is, at one level, a marvellous picture of a Chinese village during the first phase of Communist rule – its poverty and superstitions spring out from the pages (despite the lack of a conventional narrative structure) – but, at another level, a profound meditation on the nature of language and its rootedness in human experience in all its astonishing variety. By focusing on the dialect (and the characters who use it) of one small remote village, Han, it seems to me, the writer is making a valuable point about the dangers of totalitarian manipulation of language, but also about the futility of such attempts at control. It's also a useful reminder that Chinese is not a single monolithic language in the way Westerners might think of it.
Translating such a work must have been a nightmare, and Julia Lovell is to be congratulated. My only (minor) criticism of the English edition would be that the Chinese characters at the top of each section are not provided with pinyin transliteration, so the reader has no way of knowing how to pronounce the words. ( )

Jag gillar inte den här sortens litteratur. Det finns flera exempel på den; när en gemensam nämnare bildar en "ursäkt" för att skriva en massa olika historier som egentligen är fristående.
I det här fallet är titelns "Maqiao" en liten kinesisk by, dit berättaren kommer i början av kulturrevolutionen för att "lära sig" det lantliga livet, stadsbo som han är egentligen. Så berättas historier om olika människor i denna by. Och det är tråkigt.
Författaren har valt att göra romanen till en fiktiv ordbok över den kinesiska dialekt som används i byn. Det är kanske en rolig idé, men känns det inte lite pretto? ( )