Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie

I probably should have known better than to read Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie. I don’t generally have a great fondness for books that take place in China, since they all seem the same. With this book, however, I was completely suckered in by the title. What a great title! Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch.

To my credit, the premise of the book is also completely different from the usual Chinese sob story:

After years of studying Freud in Paris, Mr. Muo returns home to introduce the blessings of psychoanalysis to twenty-first-century China. But it is his hidden purpose--to liberate his university sweetheart, now a political prisoner--that leads him to the sadistic local magistrate, Judge Di. The price of the Communist bureaucrat's clemency? A virgin maiden. And so our middle-aged hero Muo, a Westernized romantic and sexual innocent himself, sets off on his bicycle in search of a suitable girl. Muo's quest will take him from a Chengdu mortuary to a rural panda habitat, from an insane asylum to the haunts of the marauding Lolo people. Along the way, he will lose a tooth, his virginity, and his once unshakable faith in psychoanalytic insight. But his quixotic idealism will not waver, even as he comes to see that the chivalrous heart may have room for more than one true love.

Sounds just as good as its title, doesn’t it?

Unfotunately, the book was a Disappointment to me. I got the same feeling as when I read Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami: everything that happened was interesting, but ultimately, I just didn’t care.

Again, I am in complete disagreement with the critics. This book also received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, and others had high praise for it. Now that I look at my selection of books this week, I am beginning to wonder if there is something wrong with me.

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie

Tags: book+review disappointments china Dai+Sijie