Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch | Dai Sijie | A Sweet Picaresque Novel that Never Fails to Charm

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch | Dai Sijie | Felt like I was watching a Woody Allen flick

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Mr. Muo's Travelli...

	Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch Dai Sijie Anchor, 2006 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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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.

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A Sweet Picaresque Novel that Never Fails to Charm

I loved Dai Sijie's debut novel, "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress." I love the film, so when I learned Dai had written a second novel, "Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch," I bought a copy as soon as I could.

The star of "Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch" is, of course, Mr. Muo, himself, an earnest, beleaguered, forty-year-old virgin who's without charm, height, good eyesight, or good looks. However, none of that seems to matter.

Mr. Muo is a self-styled psychoanalyst (his degree is actually in linguistics), who's returned to his native China after eleven years of exile in Paris. While in Paris, Mr Muo became enamoured of both Freud and Lacan and even underwent psychoanalysis himself, though it must have been a very unconventional psychoanalysis for Dai's omniscient narrator tells us that Muo spoke Chinese, of which his analyst understood not a word

Muo has a private agenda for wanting to bring psychoanalysis to China: He wants to secure the release from prison of his university sweetheart, a thirty-six-year-old photographer named Volcano of the Old Moon. Volcano of the Old Moon is serving a life sentence for giving photographs of police brutality during the Tiananmen Square massacre to members of the Western press, however, the lecherous, mah-johngg playing Judge Di has promised Muo her release if only Muo can bring him one thing...a virgin to deflower. So, Muo becomes, what else? A virgin in search of a virgin.

Mr. Muo's quest becomes the throughline of this picaresque novel as the protagonist sets off on his bicycle for the southern provinces, a banner flying above his head that reads: "Interpreter of Dreams, Psychoanalyst Returned From France and Schooled in Freud and Lacan." Psychoanalysis proves to be hard to peddle in China, however, and Muo is soon branded a fortune-teller. No matter, he continues his quest and never loses sight of his goal, even likening Volcano of the Old Moon to Don Quixote's Dulcinea.

One would think finding a virgin in a country with a population as great as China's would be fairly easy, but for Mr. Muo, at least, it's not. He ends up in a mental hospital, from which he escapes; he ends up in a domestic workers' market, where he encounters several different problems; he ends up bobbing in the water near a seaside crab restaurant, and really, we aren't surprised at this turn of events at all.

"Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch" is a sweet, romanticized book, much like "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," but it's less focused and more sprawling. Where Dai's first book was a perfectly structured, highly polished little gem, "Mr. Muo's Tavelling Couch" often rambles and the flashbacks slow down the pace. I know some people who didn't like the character of Mr. Muo, but I found his bumbling innocence both charming and endearing. Needless to say, I liked him a lot.

Anyone looking for a realistic view of China after the Cultural Revolution won't find it in this book. It's too sweet, too humorous, too gentle, too tongue-in-cheek. But therein lies its charm. I thought the ending was a little weak and I think readers looking for something as perfect as "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" might be disappointed, but still, even when it makes a misstep, "Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch" never fails to entertain and it never fails to charm.

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Felt like I was watching a Woody Allen flick

I really enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected to. It had me chuckling on the train to myself the whole time. It wasn't contrived writing either, it was very natural and entertaining. The whole time I was reading this book it had a very familiar aspect to it. The story itself wasn't familiar to me, but something about it was. Then it hit me--Woody Allen! I have watched almost all of his films and I can totally picture Woody in this role of Mr. Muo, down to the eyeglasses and the weird predicaments. If you like Woody Allen, I would wager that you will like this as well.

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Long strange trip

This was one of the strangest books I have read. The Virgin's Dilemma could have been an alternate title. If you don't mind most of the book having to do with a very out of place man, trying to rescue his "virgin" sweetie form jail, while wrestling with his virginity and asking about the virginity of various young women he meets, this is the book for you.

Convoluted, enjoyable tale

This is the story of a man trying to get the woman he loved (unrequittedly) in college out of jail. The characters are likeable, and I really enjoy this author's writing style. I didn't mind the meandering nature of the plot - except for one thing. The story didn't seem to have an ending, it just seemed to reach a certain point of convolutedness and then stop. For that reason, I'm not able to give this book a higher rating.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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