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misslezlee 's review for:
Happy Dreams
by Jia Pingwa
This novel reminds me of the foreign movies from The Film Movement. The ones with subtitles, where you know you've not fully understood what's going on.
I read this book on my Kindle so I was only aware of the percentage of the book I had read and not the page numbers. That probably didn't help. The first 80% is very repetitive. The protagonist, a migrant worker, goes out into the streets of a Chinese city and repeats the same activities he did the previous day. I thought maybe something was lost in translation. I got stuck at 30% forever and almost didn't push myself any further. Things pick up at the 80% mark but the best part comes after you've finished the book and you read the author's notes. He describes the real people he based the novel on, the events that stalled his writing and his writing process. To me, this was far more vivid and interesting than the novel he wrote. His old school friend, who becomes Happy in the novel, would probably have written a better story.
I read this book on my Kindle so I was only aware of the percentage of the book I had read and not the page numbers. That probably didn't help. The first 80% is very repetitive. The protagonist, a migrant worker, goes out into the streets of a Chinese city and repeats the same activities he did the previous day. I thought maybe something was lost in translation. I got stuck at 30% forever and almost didn't push myself any further. Things pick up at the 80% mark but the best part comes after you've finished the book and you read the author's notes. He describes the real people he based the novel on, the events that stalled his writing and his writing process. To me, this was far more vivid and interesting than the novel he wrote. His old school friend, who becomes Happy in the novel, would probably have written a better story.