The block pattern of The Seventh Day at Suzhou Bookstore in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province Photo: Courtesy of New Classic Culture, publisher of the new book

This year is a big year for Chinese novels, with a long list of leading domestic authors including Wang Anyi, Su Tong, Yu Hua and A Lai already or soon to publish new works. Currently with Su's latest work, The Tale of the Siskin, just released, Yu Hua, another representative writer of the avant-garde literary upsurge of the mid 1980s and 1990s, comes out with his long anticipated novel, The Seventh Day.

Thanks to the domestically banned film To Live by Zhang Yimou in 1994, which was adapted from Yu's original novel and earned high international recognition, Yu is far more recognized in the world over other leading authors at home (except for Mo Yan now).

That's why each time news about a new release by Yu begins flying around, readers and literature critics crane their necks waiting for the new book to land. That was the case seven years ago for Yu's last novel, Brothers, and it's happening now for The Seventh Day.

Simply by informing bookstores about the release of Yu's new book and without revealing any of the contents, the publisher received more than 700,000 orders from bookstores around the country. And within 24 hours of the book's release on June 14, both its paper and electronic versions topped the sales charts of amazon.cn.

However, the overwhelming attention didn't result in corresponding praise for the book. Just like the embarrassment Brothers encountered in 2006, The Seventh Day triggered an uproar questioning whether Yu has gone over the hill as a great writer who once created classics like To Live (1992), Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (1995) and Cries in the Drizzle (2003).

Drifting souls

Labeled by the publisher as more desperate than To Live and more absurd than Brothers, the story in The Seventh Day is about a man's seven-day tour after his death. Yang Fei, the only leading character in the book, dies in an accident but can't afford the expensive cemetery. So he becomes a solitary drifting soul without a burial place.

Hence he starts his seven-day infernal wandering during which he meets other dead souls who like him didn't have the money to buy a cemetery space and ended up wandering as ghosts. Meeting them enables Yang to experience a series of absurdities, which are actually a reflection of real occurrences in the daily lives of Chinese people.

For example, on the third day of his tour he runs into 38 dead souls who were killed in widely reported fire, reminding Yang that the number was only seven when he was still alive and read the news about it. Also on the fifth day, he meets a man who was executed for murdering his wife who had been missing but police never found her body. But half a year after his sentence was carried out, the wife returned home, implicating cases of injustice often seen in recent years.

Examples hinting at recent social realities fill the book: there's the "rat tribe (those people who can only afford to live in dark and messy basements in big cities due to high rents)," police being killed by vengeful criminals, and the illegal but rampant underground kidney selling business of the past.

In the book, the author creates a fair and caring infernal world to strike a sharp contrast with the real world. "The Seventh Day shows Yu Hua's anxiety, anger or even despair about reality," said Hong Zhigang, a literature critic who wrote the Critical Biography on Yu Hua in 2005. "This is utterly a realism novel," Hong told the Global Times.

A news skewer

Despite the pressing take on social realities, the book is criticized for kneading together too many news stories from the headlines. "Clearly the book isn't a seven-year work and it actually didn't need much time to finish since half of the contents are hot topics on Weibo in recent years," said Lu Shu, a veteran member of douban.com, a  site that provides information and comments on books, films and music.

"It writes seven days in seven chapters, and in each day the protagonist encounters different people and stories, but the stories don't relate to each other except for the common feeling of despair," said Lu, "The fragmented stories make the whole book look like a collection of short stories."

Choosing to concentrate news in a literary work is a risky choice for a writer, especially one who has established fame through the way he tells stories. In Yu's early works like To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, his ability to convey feelings of sadness and compassion for the characters in a concealed way impressed many readers.

But this time, he chose to put those "already extremely tragic" ingredients straightforward on the table, trying to hit readers more directly and deeply. "From the perspective of social responsibilities, The Seventh Day is a good book for its bold revealing of society," said Lu, "but from the aspect of its literary value, I'm not a fan."

Yet in Hong's view, vast references of social news are just the author's way to show readers more deeply the gruesome nature of our lives. "Too many uses of it definitely spark controversy, but he still chose to write them all out instead of just selecting one or two to weave a linear story, which he was adept at. He wants to reflect life with the quantity of facts," said Hong.

Style aversion?

Stylistic changes in this new book do not just lie in the way stories unfold, but also in the use of language. Diverting from his usual plain and detailed recounting of incidents that befall the characters and the way those characters react, Yu this time used a lot of inner monologues mingled with rhetoric.

When describing the mental state of leading character Yang Fei, Yu often communicates an idea through imagery: "I feel like a tree back to the forest, a drip of water back into a river, and a particle of dust back to the earth."

But Lu said, "I don't like this kind of rhetoric. It's repetitive and pretentious, I wasn't touched."

According to Hong, the style is not changed and is consistent with the Yu's usual style. "Realism and absurdity are always mixed in his novels, and this one is no exception. When he writes about human caring..., it is very real, and when it comes to absurdities like compulsory demolition, he takes the irony to extremes," said Hong.