A lot of nonsense

Author: Liu Zhenyun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: A Gutter of Nonsense tells the story of a place called West Li Street in the 50th Street, where a group of imaginative people live. These shoe repairmen, shower attendants, tripe soup vendors, gigolos, and scrap collectors all dream of lives unrelated to themselves. They enjoy imitating performances, debates, and Happy Campers. They like to tell jokes while repairing shoes, giving showers, selling tripe soup, or chatting after meals. But suddenly one day, they are scared out of their wits by the things they have said and done. To restore their normal lives, they work together to fix the words they have spoken and the actions they have taken. Some spend their fortunes getting their courage boosted, getting calcium supplements, or even blood transfusions or changing themselves; others talk endlessly about pointless chatter, only to realize by the end of the day that it was all nonsense. At this point, they begin to doubt: Are we not a bit mad and foolish? To find a cure, they travel far and wide to a distant land. On the surface, their journey seems to have a very great realistic goal—to find the reason for their madness and foolishness. However, in the process, they keep breaking free from one common sense and experience after another, making their search step by step plunge into a terrifying historical mystery. In the end, they break into a cold sweat and realize that they are still living on West Li Street. In A Gutter of Nonsense, Liu Zhenyun breaks away from the realistic style of Feather Falls, letting his abundant imagination roam freely across the vast humanistic timeline of five thousand years. In terms of narrative style, he completely breaks the one-dimensionality of objective time and space, making time lose any constraints in real-life existence and turning space into a fictional stage of life. Perhaps because only a handful of top-tier writers have rarely released new works lately, A Gutter of Nonsense has already attracted widespread attention from critics even before its publication. Many believe that from Feather Falls to A Gutter of Nonsense, Liu Zhenyun has achieved a true self-transcendence.