“China Dream” is a sharper political allegory than Mr. Ma’s earlier novels. It crackles with bruising satire of Chinese officialdom, and an acerbic wit that vaguely recalls Gary Shteyngart’s sendup of Russian oligarchs in “Absurdistan,” or even Nikolai Gogol’s portraits of Russia’s provincial aristocrats in “Dead Souls.”
Yet even for Mr. Ma, whose work is banned in mainland China, the novel is especially provocative because it makes a critique that is rarely uttered aloud these days by ordinary Chinese: that censorship and repression under a Xi-controlled Communist Party bears an eerie resemblance to that of the Cultural Revolution.
“Did you feel the temperature drop last night?” she would ask when she returned later in the afternoon. “Did you hear the banging? Were you woken by the slamming door?” She was animated. The animation was in her eyes and voice. She then whispered, “It’s the Mistral.”
I’ve come to believe that she whispered because she was afraid of scaring it away.
Cobb aspired to do what everyone knows can’t be done: she was trying to catch the wind. Only fools try to catch the wind. And in photographs? If you can’t see it, how can you take a picture of it?
One wreath covers the letter O of the Holland Tunnel sign in a perfect overlap. But then, slightly to the right, the tree is hung over the N instead of the A, which better matches its shape.
And there, N, lies the problem.
Cory Windelspecht, 38, said that seeing the tree covering the N instead of that adjacent A bugged him for years. So he started a campaign to adjust the Christmas decorations.
Instead of the existential angst of imagining the future on fire everywhere, we need to look at the environment around us, understand that we’re part of that ecology, and begin in earnest to figure out how to adapt.
He pulls off this imaginative feat because his focus is on age-old themes of mortality and desire. And he trusts his readers to pay attention.
There might be little left to say about Robert Bly, the poet, critic, translator and nonagenarian whose astonishing “Collected Poems” is now available. Ever since 1962, when “Silence in the Snowy Fields” established him as a poet of desperate sincerity, he has been a paragon of Jungianism against the brutality of capitalism and militancy. He’s hardly changed. But everything else has, and with it the significance of a poet who believes that poems should be near the center of life.