The curse of the mummy

The former Soviet Union is so down on its economic luck that it can no longer maintain Lenin’s embalmed body. A brash official from rural China called Liu Yingque decides to buy the deteriorating corpse, create a red tourist attraction in his own county, and so make the area rich beyond its wildest dreams. Liu’s only difficulty is finding the millions of yuan necessary to purchase Lenin.

He soon hits upon a solution: he recruits a performing troupe from nearby Liven, a village in which every resident is disabled in some way, and dispatches them on a nationwide fundraising tour. The travelling freakshow — featuring deaf-mutes exploding firecrackers next to their ears, children with polio-wasted legs running about the stage on broken glass, one-legged men jumping over beds of nails and seas of fire — becomes a runaway success, and within a year Liu has the money to pay off the Russians. In a turnaround typical of high-level Chinese politics, though, Liu is sacked as the deal is about to be struck. His disabled performers are plundered and violated by rapacious officials, then retreat back to the isolated safety of Liven.

This is the brilliantly acerbic plot of Lenin’s Kisses, and its author, Yan Lianke, is one of mainland China’s plainest-speaking novelists. The book’s basic premise is, of course, fantastical; this reviewer has never heard of local Chinese bigwigs attempting to buy up Lenin’s remains (though is not prepared to rule out the possibility that someone, somewhere in China is planning such a money-spinner right now). Yan lets the irony of his scenario — a Communist government victimising the poorest and weakest members of society in order to enrich itself with the profits of revolutionary kitsch — speak for itself; his deadpan presentation makes the satire bite all the harder.