“Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch” Dai Sijie

My copy of “Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch” traveled much more than the actual chair in the story. I started it in Indianola, but read about half of it in Taos, New Mexico, in March of last year and finished it in San Francisco, California, this January. In between time, it went with me to Portland, Oregon, and Hilton Head, South Carolina, on trips where I thought I might finish it. My struggle to finish it has more to do with lack of focus than on how interested I was in the book, but I admit that I wasn’t as enchanted with this book as Dai Sijie’s previous “Balzac and the Little Chinese Princess.”

“Mr Muo” is a combination of Don Quixote and Kafka. Mr Muo is in search of the key that will release his first love from prison, and that key is a virgin to satisfy the needs of Judge Di. Having read the book in two chunks months apart, I couldn’t remember if Volcano of the Moon, the woman Muo loves, is real or not and that made the book seem even more like Don Quixote. Muo was educated in Europe and thinks there is a market for psychoanalysis ala Freud in China, so he interprets dreams to finance his search and put himself in contact with possible virgins. He is incarcerated, becomes the object of undesired love, and comes under scrutiny by another judge for possessing forbidden books. He encounters a variety of nubile and not-so-nubile women, struggles to keep his love for Volcano of the Moon pure, and is thwarted in his many attempts to deliver a virgin to Judge Di.

In the beginning, I felt Muo was oblivious to the reality of his situation, and even when he was successful, it was simply an accident of fate. This was somewhat off-putting for me and the writing and humor were not enough to sustain my interest. In the second half of the book he was still involved in some pretty fantastic situations, but he appears to have some control over his actions and has thought out the results, albeit with flawed logic. Regardless, I’m too goal oriented to enjoy watching someone work towards an end that is improbable and morally reprehensible and in the end may not achieve the desired result.

On the other hand, I enjoy reading about China and trying to reconcile the images with my experiences there. In the U.S., technology is steamrolling over the simple and traditional, but I suspect that while the use of technology is causing change in China, the changes not as uniform as in the U.S. For this reason, it is sometimes difficult to understand when “Mr. Muo” is taking place. The market scenes could be from the nineteenth century, and the political issues from twenty years ago, but then Muo uses a cell phone and that brings us forward in time.

I’ll look forward to Dai Sijie’s future works. I enjoy the clash of east and west that is the common theme between his two books, and hope that his future characters are as interesting as Mr. Muo but a little more down to earth.