"Kuang Chaoren" Author: Luo Yijun Publisher: Houlang丨Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House

A breakthrough work by Luo Yijun, a heavyweight writer in the contemporary Chinese literary world

✈ Editor's Recommendation

◎ Luo Yijun is an important contemporary Taiwanese writer. The themes of his works are often about the injuries, abandonment, lust, and death that people in modern cities cannot bear to tell others. The core of his funny and humorous writings is his struggle against the absurdity of the world. His rhetorical style is gorgeous, complex, and intriguing. His narrative structure is entangled, making readers feel like they are in a maze. He reconstructs our feeling mode of life in this era with a "postmodern style".

◎ "Kuang Chaoren" is a masterpiece that reflects Luo Yijun's mature writing experience and abundant creativity. It is the third masterpiece written by Luo Yijun at the peak of his career after his two representative works "Xixia Hotel" and "Daughter". He has won many major awards for this book.

◎ "Kuang Chaoren" takes the title of Kuang Chaoren, a man in "The Scholars" who was originally talented and virtuous but eventually became a philistine who was obsessed with fame and fortune. It uses the embarrassing flaws of the individual's body as a metaphor for the spiritual damage of modern people, and writes about the powerlessness and helplessness of the Monkey King Sun Wukong in "Journey to the West" who travels to the contemporary world, leading readers to the empty and cold black hole abyss beneath the dazzling landscape of civilization.

✈ Introduction

"Kuang Chaoren" is another masterpiece of Taiwan's heavyweight novelist Luo Yijun after "Xixia Hotel" and "Daughter". With his wild imagination, flower-showing, humorous and amusing writing style, the author uses the collage, blending and imitation of the Monkey King in "Journey to the West" who was originally unruly but eventually lost to the crowd, and the image of the literati in "The Scholars" and other elements to build a strange novel world full of holes and black holes. His rich and sad style writes about the various existence postures of contemporary intellectuals that seem to be set, ugly, funny, struggling desperately but unable to escape.

✈ Celebrity Recommendations

With his powerful narrative engine and dense, viral language, Luo Yijun has perfected the "Luo Yijun Collapse Body" that he has cultivated since "Xixia Hotel", "Daughter" and "Kuang Chaoren". The "always let down" Monkey King has undergone a transformation after the Western Expedition. He not only escaped from the Tathagata Palm, but even "flew out".

——Ode to the Fifth United Daily News Literary Awards

"Kuang Chaoren" shows Luo Yijun "thinking" about Taiwan and the dilemma of his own body and creation, but what happens next? The novelist has done his duty. He uses science fiction allusions and attempts to change the world with 72 transformations... We seem to see the makeup queen version of Luo Yijun, with the cold eyes of the grandfather (Lu Xun?), the gorgeous and desolate gestures of the grandmother (Zhang Ailing?), and his unique injured penis, walking towards the cold winter night streets of Taipei.

——David Wang, Professor at Harvard University

Back in the world of novels, he is still the king, the god of stories. This time he stepped out of the obscurity and difficulty of "Daughter" and wrote a sense of time that is like flying in the clouds and mist, and a sense of ever-changing joy. It is indeed as he said, very beautiful, without a sense of aging. That is Luo Yijun.

——Novelist Chen Xue

Luo Yijun dismantles the stage of the novel, making the novel a dynamic division from material to story. The sentimentality of "civilization" has a very Luo Yijun tone - I know it is futile, but I still want to try to stay a little longer before everything is destroyed... Treasures turned into stones, brocades torn, these "luxurious wastes" that Luo Yijun always thinks about reappear in "Kuang Chaoren" - the plot of "Journey to the West" is remade, making the four unlucky masters and apprentices who seek scriptures both in the real world and in the story.

——Novelist Xiao Junyi

Saying farewell to "Xixia Hotel" which was built by creating characters, and "Daughter" which created humans based on quantum mechanics, Luo Yijun continued to create/drill holes to break through the entrance to the story.

The opening chapter, “Russian Restaurant,” can be seen as a hidden preface to the work, providing a microstructure for reading the entire work. As the novel says, the restaurant is a “revolving door of time and space conversion,” which folds the outside world inward and turns the present world into a Russian nesting doll structure of fantastic images.

——Literary critic Pan Yifan

"Kuang Chaoren" is a filterable virus that grows on its own. It is the first sentence your boyfriend who didn't come home last night says to you, "Once you start lying, you can't stop." But mainly, from my point of view, it is a story about becoming a "guy."

——Writer Chen Baiqing

✈ Award record

☆ Top Ten Books of 2020

☆ The 5th United Daily News Literature Award

☆ 2019 Taipei Book Fair Grand Prize for Novel

☆ OPENBOOK Book of the Year 2018

The author has won:

☆ The 3rd Dream of Red Mansions Award: First Prize of the World Chinese Novel Award

☆ Times Literary Award Short Story Selection Award

☆ Taiwan Literature Award Golden Novel Award

☆ Kaijuan Top Ten Books of the Year, Kaijuan Best Books of the Year

☆ Asia Weekly's Top Ten Chinese Books

☆ Taiwan Province Touring Art Camp Creation Award Novel Award

☆ Top Ten Books of the Year for Readers

☆GQ 2020 Author of the Year

Luo Yijun is a full-time writer. He was born in Taipei in 1967. He graduated from the Department of Chinese Literature and Art at the Chinese Culture University and the Institute of Drama at the College of Arts (now Taipei University of the Arts). He has won many important literary awards, including the first prize of the 3rd Dream of the Red Chamber Award for World Chinese Novel, the 5th United Daily News Literature Award, the Golden Classic Award for Novel at the Taiwan Literature Award, the first prize of the Times Literature Award for Short Stories, the United Literature Novel Newcomer Award Recommended Award, and the Taipei Literature Award.

He has written "Ming Dynasty", "Maybe You Are Not a Special Child", "Pure Worries", "Taxi Driver", "Kuang Chaoren", "Storytelling by the Hu People", "Fat and Thin Writing" (co-authored with Dong Qichang), "Let Us Stay Happy Forever: The Youngest Son 2", "Daughter", "Youngest Son", "The Story of Abandonment", "The Book of Faces", "Sleepwalking Street during the Great Depression", "Xixia Hotel", "Gaara", "My Future Second Son's Memories of Me", "The Twelve Constellations of the Birth", "We", "Far Away", "Sending Away Sadness", "The Last Name of the Moon", "The Third Dancer", "Wife Dreams of Dog", "We Leave the Tavern in the Dark at Night", "The Scarlet Letter Group" and other works.