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[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] “An Outrageously Ambitious Not-Quite Masterpiece: Yan Lianke’s Heart Sutra” by Kevin McGeary

Yan Lianke (author), Carlos Rojas (translator), Heart Sutra, Glove Atlantic, 2023. 426 pgs.

Just as the late Milan Kundera was in the 2000s and 2010s, Yan Lianke is often among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in literature. And like Kundera, Yan Lianke has a history of seeing his books banned in his own country.

Whereas Kundera’s masterpiece The Book of Laughter and Forgetting contains a scene in which European literary giants including Goethe and Lermontov hold a gathering, Yan Lianke’s latest novel Heart Sutra begins even more ambitiously. The first scene is a conversation between deities, including the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, which sets a suitably transgressive tone.

The novel is set in Beijing at the National Politics University’s fictional religious training centre, and what mainly drives the plot forward is the understated romance between the 18-year-old Buddhist nun Yahui and Daoist student Gu Mingzheng. She glimpses him with admiration at one of the interfaith tug-of-war contests that the centre regularly holds.

The tug-of-wars are an example of some of Yan Lianke’s daring satire of contemporary China and the way it treats religious groups: “Yahui became certain that the Muslims were going to defeat the Daoists, the same way that someone accustomed to working in the fields would naturally be stronger than an office worker.” Watching the contests takes a toll on the health of Yahui’s mentor Jueyu, and Jueyu’s death in the first half of the novel is one of many beautifully written scenes, for which translator Carlos Rojas deserves a chunk of credit.

The book is punctuated with attractive papercutting illustrations which the repressed Yahui makes in her free time. The papercuttings reflect her desire to leave and start a secular life with Mingzheng, but this won’t be easy. As a mark of Yahui’s growing detachment from religion, in one of her papercuttings (which start out chaste and innocent), the goddess Guanyin saves her soul by working in a brothel to support others.

The relationship between Yahui and Mingzheng develops slowly. In one scene, shortly before visiting Jueyu on his death bed: “After reaching a location deep in the grove, they almost did that sinful, lusty thing, but fortunately someone happened to be walking by and kept Yahui from proceeding into the sinful abyss. In the end, she didn’t let Mingzheng enter her body’s final destination.”

A scene that many reviewers have praised is one in which the vegetarian Yahui eats her first ever meat bun: “the fragrance ran along her gums like air flowing out of a deep valley and over the mountains”. Tasting it is like a religious experience for Yahui and draws her to the possibility of a consumer lifestyle.

As he also becomes awakened to the cruelty of his surroundings, Mingzheng has many issues of his own. Although apparently fatherless, a shadowy character called Nameless talks him into the possibility that his father may have been an internationally significant figure.

Along with the stunning papercuttings, the novel’s strongest scenes are the ones between the young lovers. Early on, Mingzheng says to Yahui: Returning to secular life would be like lighting a warm fire on a cold day” as the narration observes “their bodies trembled like mountains collapsing and the Earth splitting open”. 

Other memorable scenes include when Pastor Wang Changping claims that the Chinese Communist Party was one of Jesus’s original disciples. However, there is ultimately a feeling that the whole amounts to less than the sum of the parts. The prose contains clichés including “in the blink of an eye” and “stop in their tracks”. And, superstructurally, there is often too much going on for any of the individual strands to grab a reader’s imagination.

Yan Lianke started in the military, and as a satirist who lives in Beijing, there is no denying his courage. But Heart Sutra falls just short of being the masterpiece it would like to be.

^{How to cite: McGeary, Kevin. “An Outrageously Ambitious Not-Quite Masterpiece: Yan Lianke’s Heart Sutra.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 22 Mar. 2024, chajournal.com/2024/03/22/heart-sutra.}

Kevin McGeary is a translator, Mandarin tutor and author. His short story collection The Naked Wedding was published in 2021. He is also a singer-songwriter who has written two albums of Chinese-language songs. [All contributions by Kevin McGeary.]