Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie, Ina Rilke (Translator)

From the Publisher

Having enchanted readers on two continents with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie now produces a rapturous and uproarious collision of East and West, a novel about the dream of love and the love of dreams. Fresh from 11 years in Paris studying Freud, bookish Mr. Muo returns to China to spread the gospel of psychoanalysis. His secret purpose is to free his college sweetheart from prison. To do so he has to get on the good side of the bloodthirsty Judge Di, and to accomplish that he must provide the judge with a virgin maiden.

This may prove difficult in a China that has embraced western sexual mores along with capitalism–especially since Muo, while indisputably a romantic, is no ladies’ man. Tender, laugh-out-loud funny, and unexpectedly wise, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch introduces a hero as endearingly inept as Inspector Clouseau and as valiant as Don Quixote.

The Washington Post - Elinor Lipman

… we keep reading Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch for its voice and wit, for the delicious turns of phrase and perfect characterizations of a naif with professional pretensions inside a "poor dreamy and dream-interpreting head." Will Mr. Muo narrow down his "polyamorous perversion" to the wholesome love of one woman? He has earned our fondest hope for a happy ending.

The New York Times - Christopher Atamian

The novel is strongest when Dai shadows the lives of Muo and the others with stark visions of official corruption, but even when the frenetic search for a virgin threatens to become overwhelming, his zesty storytelling continues to entertain. As Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch hurtles toward its end, one incredible encounter after another forces Muo (and the reader) to reconsider the logic underpinning not only psychoanalysis but modern life itself.

Publishers Weekly

Wong's mellifluous, theatrical voice sets the stage for this novel of Muo, a French-trained psychoanalyst who returns to his native China in search of his lost love. Finding her imprisoned by Communist fiat, Muo discovers that the only way to free her is to bring a tyrannical local judge a virgin for his delectation. Sijie's comic-romantic quest becomes a travelogue of the new China, taking in a panoply of voices, a ceaselessly chattering orchestra playing the song of life in the proto-capitalist era. Wong chooses to perform the book as an extended series of monologues, bending and playing with each word like a separate, discretely wrapped treat. Some get whispered silkily, others intoned fitfully, others yet provided with a series of intricately nuanced voices. The book becomes an opportunity for Wong to luxuriate in the sound of Sijie's words and in his own voice. Wong makes his own performance the centerpiece of his reading, and his audacious willingness to place himself at the forefront is a gamble that pays off handsomely, providing a holistic unity that elevates this audiobook over the run of its peers. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Trained as a psychoanalyst in Paris, Mr. Muo has returned to China to rescue the oddly named Volcano of the Old Moon, his university sweetheart and now a political prisoner. His desperation has led him to Judge Di, who will release poor Volcano if Mr. Muo finds him a virgin. Mr. Muo may have lived in the West, but here he's the innocent-he's even a virgin himself-and his Wonderland-like adventures as he seeks to satisfy the judge's request are eyeopening for him and the reader. In one memorable scene, Judge Di seems to have succumbed before coupling with the first virgin Mr. Muo brings him but wakes up on the embalming table. Yet this is not really a picaresque tale; it's too melancholy. It's also not quite as satisfying as the author's sparkling Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, though Balzac lovers will enjoy the perfectly crafted prose and sense of the absurd. Mr. Muo seems unduly myopic (yes, he wears glasses), his escapades are sometimes strained, and in any case he doesn't much profit from his experiences. In the end, his determination to sacrifice another to achieve his aim leaves a bad taste, but in the context of China's history that may be precisely the point. Buy where Balzac is popular. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/05.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An unlikely hero resists injustice while introducing the interpretation of dreams to China, in this fey successor to Sijie's hugely successful Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001). The eponymous protagonist is "a Chinese-born apprentice in psychoanalysis recently returned from France," where he absorbed the teachings of Freud and Lacan, and presumably the resolve to liberate his girlfriend (identified as Volcano of the Old Moon), whose freelance photographs of victims of government torture have landed her in prison, at the order of "the famous Judge Di of Chengdu, king of the criminals' hell." Sijie writes appealingly of gently eccentric Mr. Muo, who begins his picaresque misadventures as a 40-year-old virgin aflame with scholarly and humanitarian purpose, emulates Cervantes's Don in his quixotic encounters with corrupt bureaucrats, formidable women (including a truculent policewoman whom he sullenly nicknames "Mrs. Thatcher"), roving sociopaths, the staff at an Observation Post where panda droppings are examined as a means to prolonging the endangered critters' lives-and the all-too scrutable Judge Di. The latter is an unregenerate monster of appetite whose favor is susceptible to bribes, notably the offer of nubile virgins. Muo's search for one of these endangered specimens broadens his horizons agreeably, as he surrenders his own sexual innocence while laboring to satisfy the greedy magistrate's creepy demands. The story wanders as much as Mr. Muo does, moving inelegantly between past and present, relying heavily on flashbacks, and rather too frequently presenting major actions only in retrospect and in little detail. Muo-a little like Nabokov's Pnin and the protagonists ofNaipaul's early novels-is a charmer. But Sijie's latest is a very rickety construction. Nevertheless, it will very probably be another reading group sensation. First printing of 100,000; author tour

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Reading Group Guide

1. Sijie explicitly compares Muo to Cervantes’s famous knight, Don Quixote. Upon Muo’s rejection of a shop girl’s overtures, Sijie writes, “Had she insisted, had she pled for the sake of her business or her family, had she played the damsel in distress, it might have ended quite differently for Muo the incorruptible, Muo the true, Muo the knight in shining armour! Invoking the name of his own Dulcinea, he pictured her in his mind as he pedaled along the bumpy road just ahead of his dream-logo banner” [p. 96]. How is Muo’s quest Quixotic? What else does Muo seek besides a virgin as he traverses China?

2. Is Muo an unlikely hero? Is he a believable character? What are his strengths and weaknesses? Muo often does unpredictable, strange things, such as his acrobatics when he visits Judge Di’s chambers [p. 74], or when, as a boy, he shoved a whole egg into a storyteller’s mouth [p. 83]. What makes him act like this? Is he comical?

3. As the motivation for Muo’s journey, Volcano of the Old Moon is a key figure in the novel. However, like Muo’s parents, she only appears in Muo’s memories and other recollections. How does their absence reinforce the themes of the novel? Do these characters belong to a different world from Muo or the other characters with whom he becomes entangled?

4. Why does The Embalmer seem to disappear from the novel and, apparently, Muo’s thoughts after he sleeps with her?

5. Is Muo a reliable reporter on the nature of love? What is the nature of his love for each of the four women he claims he “truly loves” [p. 276]? Muo thinks that his dream about Volcano of theOld Moon’s pregnancy and her prison cell being invaded by a firing squad was, “In Freudian terms . . . a sign of ‘the beginning of the end of love’” [p. 280]. What does this mean?

6. Describing psychoanalysis as one would a religion, Muo cries, “Revelations, confessions, emotional apocalypse! Ah, the power of psychoanalysis!” [p. 95]. What is it about Freud’s writings and teachings that appeals to Muo? What power does he think lies in understanding dreams?

7. Why are all the provincial people in Chapter 6, “A Movable Couch,” so eager to have their dreams interpreted? How do they react to Muo’s interpretation of their dreams? Are their reactions what Muo expected or hoped for?

8. Muo begins his quest with doubts about his faith in Freud: “Ever since setting foot in China, Muo, the most doctrinaire of disciples, has faced looming doubts about his psychoanalytic vocation. . . . He looks for orthodox answers in his psychoanalytic texts, but when he finds the answers, they seem only more outlandish here, in his true home. Nothing disconcerts him more than the prospect of renouncing his calling” [pp. 84–5]. What about being in China makes his faith in Freud waver? Does Muo lose his faith in Freud completely by the end of his quest?

9. Toward the end of the novel, Muo concludes, “No one can truly comprehend a dream. But not even artists, a breed apart, understand the meaning of dreams. They merely create them, live them and end up as the dreams of others” [p. 281]. How are the creations of artists—including books—like dreams? If books are like dreams, and dreams cannot be interpreted, what is Sijie implying about the ability of the reader to understand a book?

10. In the chapter entitled, “The Sea Cucumber,” Sijie describes in exhaustive detail the food that Judge Di consumes [p. 257]. For what is food a metaphor? How are the physical appetites and desires of the characters different from their spiritual desires? Do these different desires intersect or overlap?

11. “How China has changed!” Muo observes on the train ride home [p. 9]. The China of Muo’s youth was the China governed by Mao Tse-Tung and his Great Cultural Revolution. Evidence of the Great Cultural Revolution is still very much present in the landscape of China, from the fields of execution [p. 59] to the denunciations collected by the Stork in the basement of the courthouse [p. 199]. What can the reader surmise is Sijie’s opinion of the Cultural Revolution? What is the state of post-Cultural Revolutionary China as viewed by the now-Westernized Mr. Muo?

12. Muo thinks, “Now Fate had decreed that Judge Di should be the one to spur him on to resume his old quest, driving him to realize the old ideals concretely, with a proper balance of revolutionary romance and proletarian realism, as Mao would have wished. Nowadays, great leaps forward are par for the course in the communist world, but that hardly makes Mao’s leap less great” [p. 277]. Is Dijie’s homage to Mao Tse-Tung sincere? Is Muo as much—or more—a product of Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist China as he is a disciple of Freud? Is Muo’s true home in China or France?

13. In a passage about Judge Di’s successes, Sijie writes, “Some years later, when his life was all sunshine (not thanks to the rays cast by the Great Helmsman, despite the song sung by billions of his countrymen for half a century—‘The sky reddens in the East. The sun rises. It is he, Mao, our president . . . ’—but rather to the sun rising in West, the sun of capitalism in the communist mode)” (p. 259). Is there other evidence of capitalism’s influence on the modern China to which Muo returns? How has China reconciled this capitalistic influence with its communistic state?

14. Is there a distinctive “Chinese” personality that is different from a Western personality? How are the Chinese men portrayed compared to the Chinese women in the novel? Are their dreams different?

15. Muo compares the self-denunciations collected by The Stork from the Great Cultural Revolution to “confessional novels” [p. 200]. What do each of these types of confessions have in common with the central motif of the novel: the sharing of ones dreams? Are politicians, Freud, Muo, and the reader all equally duped by their own mistaken conviction of their ability to understand the dreams of another?

16. Sijie employs an original narrative style and different devices to relay the events of the novel and to convey Muo’s inner thoughts. For example, he relates Muo’s bout in the insane asylum through a newspaper article [p. 66], Muo’s experiences with the girls in the domestic workers’ market through first-person entries in his “psychoanalytic workbook” [p. 107], and Muo’s adventures with the Lolo through a letter from Muo to Volcano of the Old Moon [p. 214]. Does Sijie’s style add another dimension to the novel or detract from its plot? Does it reinforce the themes of the novel?

17. Sijie also inserts himself occasionally as an instructive narrator: “Here it must be remembered that whatever the faults of Muo’s conduct of his own life, however crushing his ignorance, in matters of psychoanalysis, particularly as applied to the domain of dreams, his knowledge was vast and unimpeachable” [p. 90]. Is this narrator sincere or sarcastic? How does this testament to Muo’s knowledge affect the reader’s faith in Muo or ability to sympathize with him?

18. Sijie is also a filmmaker. How does the artistic viewpoint of a filmmaker manifest itself in the landscape that Muo traverses—both the physical landscape of China and the landscape of human experience and emotion? Does the viewpoint of a filmmaker affect the tone of the novel or the presentation of ideas?

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