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.
I think the mark of a great writer is to make his name inconsequential to his spoken or written word, and by that token, this book does not capture changes under communism even half as well as done famously and beautifully by Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago. Part of the problem definitely lies in the fact that I am reading too "less" into the translated word. I am sure many connotations, many references, many word combinations could strike precise metaphors and parallels with evolution of the protagonist in contemporary China. Doctor Zhivago is great even as a translation, and that is partially because Russian literature and values can be easily transcribed in English. I know translating Hindi poetry and novels -- with their rhetoric, different value system, different syntax of language and three to four thousand years worth of allusions — is a very hard enterprise. Hence most of the Eastern novels usually remain untranslated. So I value translations for what they can and do map into English, and, concerning the issue-at-hand, for what Cries has to say — with hopes that its familial themes don't get lost in translation.
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