Awful Catastrophe
Author: Wen Shaoxian
Publisher: Everflow Publications
Published: 2011-03-01
Total Pages: 419
ISBN-13: 9628687395
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Awful Catastrophe is designed to reflect the entire process of the most turbulent years in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Awful Catastrophe employs two parallel developing threads: One to have the important political events in various periods run through the whole book, and the other to make various tragic stories of the characters develop by centering on the above political events throughout the novel. The two threads closely weave together as flesh and blood from beginning to end, setting off each other conspicuously, so as to enable the readers to have a strong sense of reality as if they placed themselves into the actual situation. It is a novel, of course, but one can also regard it as a history book about the Cultural Revolution in a certain sense. This book can be regarded as the walking encyclopedia of the Cultural Revolution. Concreteness and authenticity are the other characteristics that can make those writers who have no experience in the Cultural Revolution but want to write about it lose confidence and thus they might lay down their pen right away. During such a time of reversal, a lot of people were made fool of, many pure souls were stained with dust, many lofty ideas were shattered and the love between many lovers was strangled. The book also presents to the readers such things as distortion of human nature, inhumanity, ugly sides of human souls and so on. Simon Chan, the hero of the book, is a typical character of the Chinese intellectuals. His involvement in the torrential political waves to his missing precisely represents the tragic fate of the young intellectuals at that time. The novel, in addition to narrating every step of his political performance in this political storm in a deep going way, narrates his tender love and intimate relations with Flora and Gem with literary grace. The difference between this novel and the other literary works also reflecting the Cultural Revolution lies in the fact that it minutely narrates every step and the progress of the Cultural Revolution in a macroscopic and all-direction manner. It succeeds in depicting the very complicated relations among the characters from the high, medium and low strata in the most unbridled and most senseless days in this disastrous movement. No other literary works have been able to bring to light the complete picture of the Cultural Revolution so deep in length and so broad in scale so far in China or elsewhere in the world.
