Deep Mountains

Deep Mountains is a novel by Lü Xin, a leading figure of China's avant-garde literature, written after a long absence from the long-form. It was first published in October·Novels, issue 5, 2023, and appeared as a standalone volume from CITIC Press Group in August 2024: 39 chapters, roughly 330,000 characters. The novel portrays the people of a village in the ravines of the Taihang Mountains in northern Shanxi: Mouse, a boy as thin as a bean sprout; Wu Deng, a youth who, after his elder brother Er Deng dies suddenly on the opera stage, cannot let go of his second sister-in-law's remarriage; "She," married in from afar and closely watched by her in-laws, who leaves not even her name behind; Du Lin, a literary young man who returns home and uses his notebooks to expose the absurdities of village life; and Gu Zhenglou, a village cadre who exercises petty malice through the little power he holds. There are also people who eat sunflower seeds while carrying a coffin, people who snap up yellow cloth to make clothes and seek the gods' protection, and strangers of unknown identity who burst in. Each chapter consists of three parts: the narrative proper, the villagers' "off-stage voices" set in kaiti, and The Du Lin Notebooks. The three fill in and argue with one another, weaving family lineages, the unpredictability of life and death, and the changes of the times into a whole, so that the "backside" of a desolate mountain region seems to buzz with voices. The novel does not unfold chronologically but collages memory and reality, truth and hallucination, so that it reads like a narrative maze; one may also enter at any chapter. Beneath the magical-realist details lies generation after generation of villagers busy living and busy dying, yet each resisting fate in their own way and trying to break out of the mountains that surround them.