Mr Muo's Travelling Couch

Mr Muo's Travelling Couch

Summary

Dai Sijie's bestselling and much loved first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, was a delightful fable. His second is a Chinese Don Quixote following the peripatetic misadventures of Mr Muo, China's first psychoanalyst.

It's been over ten years since Muo left China. He's been happily studying Freud in France since then. But when he hears that his first love has been thrown into a Chinese jail he rushes home to rescue her. Muo tries to bribe Judge Di but, sick of cash and cars, the judge demands that he find him a virgin to deflower instead. And so Muo embarks on a hilarious quest...

Witty, surreal, moving, wonderfully picaresque, it is packed full of stories, anecdote, incident and mishap, all resulting in a highly enjoyable satire of one innocent man's attempt to negotiate the mind-boggling maze of modern China.

Winner of the Prix Femina.

Reviews

  • A literary road movie...veers from hilarious to horrific
    Daily Mail

About the author

Dai Sijie

Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a filmmaker who was himself 're-educated' between 1971 and 1974, and left China in 1984 for France, where he has lived and worked ever since. His first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, was an overnight sensation when it appeared in France in 2000. It became an immediate bestseller and won five prizes. It is now published in over thirty-five countries. His film of the book was chosen to open the Cannes Film Festival in 2002. His second novel, Mr Muo's Travelling Couch, became a bestseller in its first French edition.
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