Cries in the Drizzle is the most recently translated work of Chinese writer Yu Hua. His previously translated titles include To Live (winner of Italy's Premio Grinzane Award in 1998) and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. He was awarded the James Joyce Foundation Award in 2002. To Live has sold over a half million copies in China and was also adapted into a movie by Zhang Yimou. While translations of these two books appeared in 2003, Cries in the Drizzle is a translation of the writer's earlier work, and is said to be less well known and perhaps less accomplished than the latter two. (My review is based upon the translation by Allan H. Barr. This is the first book of contemporary Chinese fiction that I have read, and so my review is based on my comparisons with classic and contemporary Indian and Western fiction.)

The novel is written in form of a narrative, unraveled in the voice of a child and a teenager growing up during the 1960s and 1970s. He is virtually ignored by his parents, and older and younger brothers, and is sent away at age six to spend five years with another family. He, Sun Guanglin, returns to his family when he is just at the threshold of adolescence, and the separation of five years distances him from the household even more. We peer into the lives of his father, grandfather, brothers and neighbors through his somewhat detached perspective. The novel works through a series of reminisces, and as we thread through memories, we find shards of information that we must pluck one by one and associate together to form a complete tale. One may call it a collection of stories in which time ebbs and flows, each "time" receding to leave more shells that the author picks and throws at us.

I have a distinct liking for novels which furnish a good story, and have a climactic ending. Coming of age novels like Of Human Bondage appeal as the reader learns from the experiences of the protagonist. Novels about adolescents seeing and understanding the world around them are made interesting by the use of this knowledge in some form at a later stage in life, such as in Great Expectations. At the opening of Cries, the novel promises much more than what it delivers in the final quarter of the story. The build-up raises an expectation about what Sun Guanglin would turn out as after a childhood wherein he is treated as a non-entity. Be it diversions into sexual or political references, somewhat Joyce-like at times, or the underplayed drama conveyed via a very contemporary style of writing, Yu Hua intermittently succeeds and fails in engaging my attention.

Perhaps just because I refuse to see it as a novel of growing up in the reign of Communist Mao, I find the allusions and metaphors of the story half-cooked. By a stretch of imagination, I can find an undercurrent in the story that shows "the changing dynamics of Chinese society under Communist rule" (quoting from the back cover). But to say so, I need to read too much into the life story of Yu Hua, for he grew up in such a society.