Naked Earth
Man’s inhumanity to man is the overarching theme of this brilliant, eloquently told tale of two Chinese students sent to the countryside to help with Mao Tse-Tung’s land reform movement and their disillusionment as they witness, and are even forced to participate in, acts of senseless brutality against the peasants they have come to help. Soon Liu Ch’uen and Su Nan realize that no one is safe, and that the best of qualities—loyalty, honor, love—are useless at best in a land where “the whole country lay stretched out like an open palm ready to close around any one person at any minute.” Spies, thieves, liars, and hypocrites abound; treachery is the rule, not the exception; and the lovers learn that they cannot trust anyone, not even themselves.
In spare, masterful prose, Eileen Chang, one of China’s most revered writers, spins a tale of love and betrayal, greed and goodness, and death and rebirth. Liu, falsely accused and sent to fight in the Korean War, faces a crucial decision at book’s end that allows him, at last, to find redemption—a testament, as with so much great literature, to the resiliency of the human spirit. Initially published in 1956 and unavailable outside Hong Kong, this New York Review Books re-issue deserves a place among the classic literary works of the ages. Compelling, thought-provoking and profoundly moving, it comes highly recommended.
