The Earthen Gate - Pingwa, Jia

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Résumé :
?From that moment onwards, the dog and I both found ourselves incapable of ever cherishing a sense of belonging.?Constantly bickering with her shallow friend Brow, beginning correspondence courses she will never finish, helping sage-like Grandpa Cloud Forest with his mystical healing and stealthily avoiding matrimony with her less-than-impressive fianc? Old Ran, Plum?s life appears to be puttering along what seems like a tediously predictable path. But when the village home she cherishes comes under threat from big city capitalists, she finds herself thrust into a series of adventures with a mercurial rogue called Chivalry. This raucous, and at times achingly poignant tale combines earthy humour, ancient wisdom and thrilling action to highlight the impact of creeping urbanisation on traditional country folk.

Biographie:
Jia Pingwa (1952- ) stands with Mo Yan and Yu Hua as one of the biggest names in contemporary Chinese literature. A prolific producer of novels, short stories and essays, he has a huge following on the Chinese mainland, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan. An early English translation of his 1988 novel Turbulence by Howard Goldblatt won the Mobil Pegasus Prize for Literature. In 1997, his 1993 bestseller Ruined City was first published abroad in French as La Capitale d?chue (Abandoned Capital), translated by Genevieve Imbot-Bichet. It was published in English translation in January 2016, again by Howard Goldblatt, this time as part of the Chinese Literature Today Book Series. Happy Dreams, translated by Nicky Harman, and The Lantern Bearer, translated by Carlos Rojas, were published in 2017. Jia Pingwa's fiction focuses on the lives of common people, particularly in his home province of Shaanxi, and is well-known for being unafraid to explore the realm of the sexual. Ruined City was banned for many years for that same reason, and pirated copies sold on the street for several thousand yuan apiece. The novel was finally unbanned in 2009, one year after Jia won the Mao Dun Award for his 2005 novel Shaanxi Opera.

Sommaire:
Jia Pingwa is the chairman of the Shaanxi Writers Association and one of the most influential contemporary Chinese writers. His representative works include Turbulence, Waste Capital, Shaanxi Opera, Ancient Stove, Shanben, Records of Qinling Mountains, Tales of Rivers and Mountains, and others. His works have won numerous major awards, including the Mao Dun Literature Award, Lu Xun Literature Award, and Shi Naian Literature Award, and have been translated into over 40 languages such as English, French, German, and Russian for publication. They have also been adapted into various artistic forms such as films, TV dramas, and plays....