“Abandon all hope, ye who walk the yellow mud road.”
A playful (semi) Dantean quotation that can be applied – with some points of contact – also to The Yellow Mud Road (Utopia, translation by Maria Rita Masci) by Can Xuea novel that takes you into a world surreal e unsettlingwhere reality mixes with dreams, nightmares e folklore.
In this book the writer Chinese – born in Changsha in 1953among the most acclaimed voices of the contemporary chinese literature (so much so that it is often the protagonist of rumours relating to the favourites for the Nobel Prize for literature) – portrays a road of yellow mud, a road shrouded in mystery that seems to exist only in memory confused of its unlikely and disparate inhabitants.
The Machinery Factory S is the only “daughter” of this street where, with the arrival of the mysterious Wang Ziguangeverything starts to change…
The narrative crafted by Xue – surreal and avant-gardewith a particular reference to the works of Dante, Kafka e Borges – in fact presents a place/non-place in which, with the fateful advent of theanti-messiah Ziguang, nightmares and rot begin to creep in. The small, dazzling blue veronica flowers that once grew on the roadside are now covered in dust and excrement. The climate soon becomes suffocating, itchy, excoriating and a thick black-ink rain begins to flood the village.
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“At the time we had no doubts, but now we are not even sure that it was a real person” the inhabitants repeat obsessively, reconstructing fragments of disconnected and hallucinatory conversations, unable to trace the beginning of that waking nightmare. It is useless – and at the very least utopian – to search for one fine. Dreams end up taking over a society alienatedindistinguishable from the media and information chaos that frequently inhabits today’s online exchanges.
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The world created by Can Xue is in fact dominated, in the most post-truthful of meanings, by theunreliability of science and from theinevitability of legends: the society is lost and without hope. A metamorphosis Of kafkian memoryin which the author accentuates the sense of absurdity e despair with a creative act detached from the context of belonging: “My works are not like Western or Chinese ones, but rather my own creation” he tells the China Internet Information Centrein an article taken from the BBC.
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“The yellow mud road could not free itself from dreams. They dreamed of spiders, flies, grass on the walls, beetles with long horns and polka-dotted backs, small purple flowers, everything that was summer. Bats and wasps flew over their heads. Their snoring echoed in the small houses, shaking the accumulated dirt on the windows and making them creak.”alienation more total reigns supreme and undisturbed, the disharmony It pervades cacophonous conversations and acidic collective visions.
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A dreamy context in which institutions, ineffective and sometimes ridiculous, circumnavigate problems that were, are and will remain unsolved. Ainvestigation it extends to almost all the inhabitants of the street, who at a certain point in the narrative all become “Wang Sima“, foreign and corrosive elements.
Everyone mephitic, filthy, indecent, repugnant and indelibly stained. As proof that, despite Messiah improvised e factories dilapidated (or, perhaps, precisely because of the latter), one concept remains firm in the minds and eyes of the frightened inhabitants: “the road has no hope“.
