The Lonely Satan

The Lonely Satan is a novel by Mu Tong (pen name of Chang Jiang), published in 2007 by Northern Literature and Art Publishing House. The novel revolves around four young people who call themselves "Satan": they begin as strangers, differing in age, background, and temperament, yet share one disposition—they are accustomed to solitude, contemptuous of social convention, and determined to go their own way. One young man, born into a merchant family, leaves home for Peking University after his family breaks apart, his father turns cold, and he comes to hate his stepmother; online he meets "Satan the Third," who has long lived under patriarchal pressure and suffers from depression. The two comfort and understand each other, and a same-sex love the world will not accept develops between them. "Satan the Second" is Satan the Third's cousin, who comes from Shanghai to stay at her cousin's home in Beijing but falls in love with a university professor twenty years her senior—"Satan the Fourth"—and an extramarital affair that crosses both age and the teacher-student line unfolds. The four lives run parallel yet keep intersecting, and the story unfolds slowly in this lonely city: there is the pain of birth, chance encounters, a love branded heretical, and the harsh reproach of "angels" along with fated calamity. The novel is narrated in the first person by each of the four protagonists in turn; the prose is clean, restrained, and realistic, aiming to present a kind of "naked truth." Through the predicaments of these marginal figures, the author explores the tension between loneliness, desire, and moral judgment in modern urban life. Because it deals with homosexuality and an extramarital teacher-student affair, the book met many obstacles in publication and circulation, yet spread widely online; it became one of Mu Tong's representative works and has been translated into several languages and published abroad.