Old Kiln

Old Kiln is Jia Pingwa's longest novel to date, exceeding 600,000 characters and four years in the making. The story takes place in Old Kiln Village in Shaanxi, a place known for its pottery: its hills and waters are clear, its livestock thrive, yet it is poor and isolated, and the villagers live by crafts and rules handed down through generations, while grudges among the Zhu, Ye, and other clans slowly silt up in the trivia of daily life. In the winter of 1965, news from beyond the mountains drifts into the village and its calm begins to loosen; over the following year and more, from Destroy the Four Olds and big-character posters to the forming of rebel teams, factional alignments, denunciation and struggle sessions, and large-scale armed clashes, almost everyone is swept up. Small neighborly resentments are magnified by political rhetoric, people swing back and forth between collective fervor and human ties, and once-warm village relations slide step by step toward suspicion, confrontation, and violence, until the village of clear hills and waters becomes a ruin of the humanistic spirit. The novel unfolds mainly through the eyes of a boy nicknamed Dog Urine Moss: short and uncomely, the child has an uncanny sensitivity, able to smell the disasters and deaths that befall villagers and to talk with cats, dogs, grasses, and trees, and his innocence and compliance set off the absurdity and cruelty of the adult world. Structured in the sequence winter, spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring, the book weaves in a wealth of Guanzhong dialect and everyday detail, presenting with an almost documentary hand the true trajectory of grassroots Chinese society during that movement—a vivid portrait by the author of rural China in those years.