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Playing for Thrills
Wang Shuo emerged as a literary force in China in the late 1980s, pioneering a movement known as pizi wenxue, or hooligan literature. Instead of ascribing to the Communist Party's goal of "spiritual civilization," he shunned the heroic models common in Chinese literature. Playing for Thrills is the first book published in English from the man whom Newsweek calls "China's literary bad boy" and The Washington Post acclaims as "the irreverent voice of a disillusioned generation." With shades of Chandler and Kerouac, Playing for Thrills is a dark, disembodied, yet compelling story of an antihero's search for the truth about a mysterious murder. As the narrator drifts through the seamy underside of Beijing and its environs, he meets a handful of incredibly varied characters as jaded and enigmatic as himself.
* Banned by the Chinese Government for "pander[ing] to low tastes," Wang Shuo's work is increasingly popular in China and worldwide
* In China, his more than twenty bestsellers have sold nearly ten million copies and a dozen of his books have been turned into TV soap operas and films
* Banned by the Chinese Government for "pander[ing] to low tastes," Wang Shuo's work is increasingly popular in China and worldwide
* In China, his more than twenty bestsellers have sold nearly ten million copies and a dozen of his books have been turned into TV soap operas and films
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1889
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
December 17, 2013
Now see, this is why teh internets can never fully replace real life. Sure I buy most of my books used online, but then sometimes I am in the city running errands and am seduced by the lure of an outdoor table full of books, upon which I find something like this little gem. What the hell is this? Who on earth is Wang Shuo? I've never heard of him; seems like Goodreads hasn't really either. I'm only dimly aware of the publisher (No Exit Press), even. And yet... this book is fucking great, already, and I'm only a couple dozen pages in. Hooray for surprises!
***
What a strange book! Strangely great, I think, though I'm not totally sure. The back cover blurb & endorsements name-drop Raymond Chandler, Bruce Lee, Richard Brautigan, John Woo, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut. Which: whew, obvs that sets up unacheivably high expectations. Oddly, the person I kept thinking of when I was reading was William Burroughs, which is weird because Wang Shuo is a much clearer, comprehensible writer than I remember Burroughs being, and also because it's probably been fifteen years since I read Naked Lunch, so I don't know what connection I think I'm making. I think what I mean is that this book is very slippery. It fools you with straightforward language and mundane details and purported realism, but then it is also often a surreal mess.
Let me back up. (Why do I write reviews like this? Give a bunch of impressions that surely mean nothing to anyone, and then go back and try to summarize? I guess because this is how my thoughts work: feeling first, then sense)
Anyway, this is the story of a group of low-grade hustlers, kind of. They're in early middle age, they play liar's poker all day and run minimally dangerous scams on people. They're all kind of mean and snippy. Then one morning our "hero," Fang Yan, goes home to find a couple of cops waiting for him, accusing him of murdering his best friend, Gao Yan, fifteen years ago. Fang Yan doesn't have an alibi, mostly because he really doesn't remember anything from that time. So he has to start tracing his life backwards, ferreting out people he hasn't seen in over a decade, to try to learn whether he actually could have killed his friend. Inevitably, this opens up all sorts of festering sores and un-righted wrongs, and things just get weirder and stranger the further back he goes.
So like I said, all very realist. But actually no, it is not a realist book at all. I mean, at first he goes to see people and they talk and it all make sense: they are working normal jobs and they discuss bars and restaurants and friends from their youth, and then they tip him off on how to find yet others, and things proceed straightforwardly.
But things start getting fragmented pretty quick: time stops going in a line, either forward or back; people's stories change, sometimes mid-conversation; talismans and props move from person to person in ways that they shouldn't; dreams and reality begin to blur -- basically, weird impossible things start to regularly happen, but then also, just as regularly, things remain sane. Which is why I said Burroughs; though I also should mention Murakami, the way the metaphors and dreamscapes and synchronicity swirl and swirl.
Does this make any sense? Can you tell the book is confusing and strange?
One of the biggest problems for me was a near-total inability to keep the characters straight. Part of this is surely my fault for being American, but also come on, the names are all kind of similar: Liu Huiyuan, Li Kuidong, Tan Li, Li Jiangyun, Qiao Qiao, Xu Xun, Gao Jin, Gao Yang, Fan Yang... I don't even know which names signify which gender. Another problem is that rarely do characters get physical descriptions, and when they do they are often intentionally similar -- all the dudes at the table are wearing striped shirts, for ex.; or all the women have very long hair or very red lips from eating strawberry ice cream. And further, as things start to get messy, people we know in the present begin to show up in the stories of the past, but with different names, or different lives, so now you have to remember not only who this person is, but also who she was at some unspecified point in the past.
So that was rough. But as a sharp counterpoint to that, I have to point out that the language in here is great. It's dense with imaginative metaphors, like "The train was a squat black caterpillar wriggling between heaven and earth" and "She was a necklace of dewdrops, transparent, fresh, seemingly about to roll off the tip of a leaf and merge with the moss on the slippery ground." There are endless descriptions of China, shops and markets and squares and roads and forests and hotels and shantytowns. There is the requisite weird food, like stuffed flatcakes dipped in vinegar, and cocoa-filled dumplings. There are bizarre idioms, like "the smell lingers long after the fart," "when you eat grapes, sooner or later you have to spit out the seeds," and "a firecracker can't pop forever." There are teeming train stations, an apartment that is normal when you go to sleep but when you wake up has been covered with ash and all the furniture is missing. There are prostitutes, cripples, conmen, kids. There is a lot of card-playing, a lot of drinking, a lot of eating of ice cream, a decent amount of glossed-over sex. It's a long book, and it covers a lot of ground.
In summary? This is a crazy crazy book. I can't really say I loved it, but I'm definitely glad I read it.
***
What a strange book! Strangely great, I think, though I'm not totally sure. The back cover blurb & endorsements name-drop Raymond Chandler, Bruce Lee, Richard Brautigan, John Woo, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut. Which: whew, obvs that sets up unacheivably high expectations. Oddly, the person I kept thinking of when I was reading was William Burroughs, which is weird because Wang Shuo is a much clearer, comprehensible writer than I remember Burroughs being, and also because it's probably been fifteen years since I read Naked Lunch, so I don't know what connection I think I'm making. I think what I mean is that this book is very slippery. It fools you with straightforward language and mundane details and purported realism, but then it is also often a surreal mess.
Let me back up. (Why do I write reviews like this? Give a bunch of impressions that surely mean nothing to anyone, and then go back and try to summarize? I guess because this is how my thoughts work: feeling first, then sense)
Anyway, this is the story of a group of low-grade hustlers, kind of. They're in early middle age, they play liar's poker all day and run minimally dangerous scams on people. They're all kind of mean and snippy. Then one morning our "hero," Fang Yan, goes home to find a couple of cops waiting for him, accusing him of murdering his best friend, Gao Yan, fifteen years ago. Fang Yan doesn't have an alibi, mostly because he really doesn't remember anything from that time. So he has to start tracing his life backwards, ferreting out people he hasn't seen in over a decade, to try to learn whether he actually could have killed his friend. Inevitably, this opens up all sorts of festering sores and un-righted wrongs, and things just get weirder and stranger the further back he goes.
So like I said, all very realist. But actually no, it is not a realist book at all. I mean, at first he goes to see people and they talk and it all make sense: they are working normal jobs and they discuss bars and restaurants and friends from their youth, and then they tip him off on how to find yet others, and things proceed straightforwardly.
But things start getting fragmented pretty quick: time stops going in a line, either forward or back; people's stories change, sometimes mid-conversation; talismans and props move from person to person in ways that they shouldn't; dreams and reality begin to blur -- basically, weird impossible things start to regularly happen, but then also, just as regularly, things remain sane. Which is why I said Burroughs; though I also should mention Murakami, the way the metaphors and dreamscapes and synchronicity swirl and swirl.
Does this make any sense? Can you tell the book is confusing and strange?
One of the biggest problems for me was a near-total inability to keep the characters straight. Part of this is surely my fault for being American, but also come on, the names are all kind of similar: Liu Huiyuan, Li Kuidong, Tan Li, Li Jiangyun, Qiao Qiao, Xu Xun, Gao Jin, Gao Yang, Fan Yang... I don't even know which names signify which gender. Another problem is that rarely do characters get physical descriptions, and when they do they are often intentionally similar -- all the dudes at the table are wearing striped shirts, for ex.; or all the women have very long hair or very red lips from eating strawberry ice cream. And further, as things start to get messy, people we know in the present begin to show up in the stories of the past, but with different names, or different lives, so now you have to remember not only who this person is, but also who she was at some unspecified point in the past.
So that was rough. But as a sharp counterpoint to that, I have to point out that the language in here is great. It's dense with imaginative metaphors, like "The train was a squat black caterpillar wriggling between heaven and earth" and "She was a necklace of dewdrops, transparent, fresh, seemingly about to roll off the tip of a leaf and merge with the moss on the slippery ground." There are endless descriptions of China, shops and markets and squares and roads and forests and hotels and shantytowns. There is the requisite weird food, like stuffed flatcakes dipped in vinegar, and cocoa-filled dumplings. There are bizarre idioms, like "the smell lingers long after the fart," "when you eat grapes, sooner or later you have to spit out the seeds," and "a firecracker can't pop forever." There are teeming train stations, an apartment that is normal when you go to sleep but when you wake up has been covered with ash and all the furniture is missing. There are prostitutes, cripples, conmen, kids. There is a lot of card-playing, a lot of drinking, a lot of eating of ice cream, a decent amount of glossed-over sex. It's a long book, and it covers a lot of ground.
In summary? This is a crazy crazy book. I can't really say I loved it, but I'm definitely glad I read it.
March 22, 2013
Wang Shuo is known as the best and certainly the most controversial of China's "hooligan" 痞子 writers. He focuses on young people floating on the margins--those who do not fit into a society that stresses, above all, fitting in. In this novel, one of these alienated characters delves into his past to learn if he did or did not commit a murder some ten years earlier. The fact that this question arises at all, speaks of his alcohol and drug addled state at the time. What I like about Wang Shuo is that he does not, like so many modern Chinese writers, simply replay the traumatic events of China's recent history. This is not to say, however, that his works are apolitical. One could actually argue they are political at a more profound level--not so much at the surface level where one reports the sometimes sad outcome of political events but at the level of individual disillusionment, escape, and loss. He is an important contemporary Chinese writer who shows us a side of the current Chinese scene that Westerners rarely glimpse and that Chinese authorities would rather we not see at all.
April 7, 2011
Perplexing, mysterious, hypnotic. Playing for Thrills is the story of Fang Yan, a down-and-out gambler who finds himself accused of a decade-old murder. In trying to establish an alibi, Yan discovers that there is a gap of seven days for which he cannot account. His investigation leads him to some dubious characters, but as he begins to investigate that missing week, he runs into more mysteries. Who is the mysterious woman he allegedly spent the week with? What role did the man in the striped shirt play? Identities shift and become confused. Recalling film noir, the fiction of Roberto Arlt and the movie Memento, Playing for Thrills is a strange story of one man's attempt to uncover a past, yet frustrates both protagonist and reader in the way the facts to be uncovered become clearer yet less helpful the deeper one goes.
August 4, 2011
Once I figured out HOW to read the book and WHAT it was going to expect of me as a reader, I surrendered myself to it and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's one of those works of mystery that poses a question to be answered or a goal to be met, and once the main character gets there, the question/goal opens up to more questions and other goals that must be pursued. It's a crazy race of a book with fantasy, dreams, characters with multiple identities, etc. I liked it. It reminded me of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase but with MORE of everything including confusion and a constantly-digging-deeper narrative.
July 1, 2022
This book starts off with a very interesting premise, arguably even a good one. It's a mystery. A guy finds out he's the major suspect in a murder case, the death of a friend of his ten years ago. He's got to clear his name, find an alibi. The week of the supposed murder, however, he doesn't remember. Where was he? What was he doing? Could he have been the one who murdered his friend?
Imagine The Hangover as a murder mystery, and you've got kind of the gist of this work. The protagonist doesn't have a great memory. Of course, I probably wouldn't know my whereabouts from a given week ten years ago either, except that I live a very humdrum life and so could probably point to being at work, but after work? I would have no idea and little way to track that down if I hadn't taken notes in some way. Or maybe the main character was on a bender. The novel then tracks his attempts to find out what he was doing that week, as he interviews friends he knew and places that he frequented at the time.
The protagonist is something of a ne'er-do-well, a guy who spends most of his time gambling and playing around with friends, and when he can still manage, chasing tail. So are most of the characters in the novel. This makes for some degree of difficulty telling the characters apart. There's a man in a striped shirt whom nobody knows who was at the last dinner at which they saw the murdered man. But later in the book, other friends wear such a shirt, the murdered man does in a dream/memory, and even the protagonist. The characters are in a way interchangeable, which makes them a bit less interesting.
And when one doesn't have characters to root for, it all becomes about the plot. This plot is loose and goofy but substantive enough to sustain two-thirds of the book. But at that point, the novel takes an odd turn, one that plays well with the kind of players all these people are but that blows all the suspense in the book and makes it, well, not terribly interesting anymore. One gets the sense that even the author isn't all that interested anymore, from the way the last few pages of the book go.
There's probably a lot here that is missing in translation. Footnotes explain some of the cultural context, some of which I knew but most of which I didn't. There are jokes that flew right by me, not being Chinese, references to classic works and authors. Such makes me appreciate all the more works that manage to speak to a person in translation, because they speak not just to the culture in which they arose but to the human experience. This book didn't really do that, even though it made a stab at trying to say something about identity and jokes and other human things; there wasn't, in the end, enough heart.
Imagine The Hangover as a murder mystery, and you've got kind of the gist of this work. The protagonist doesn't have a great memory. Of course, I probably wouldn't know my whereabouts from a given week ten years ago either, except that I live a very humdrum life and so could probably point to being at work, but after work? I would have no idea and little way to track that down if I hadn't taken notes in some way. Or maybe the main character was on a bender. The novel then tracks his attempts to find out what he was doing that week, as he interviews friends he knew and places that he frequented at the time.
The protagonist is something of a ne'er-do-well, a guy who spends most of his time gambling and playing around with friends, and when he can still manage, chasing tail. So are most of the characters in the novel. This makes for some degree of difficulty telling the characters apart. There's a man in a striped shirt whom nobody knows who was at the last dinner at which they saw the murdered man. But later in the book, other friends wear such a shirt, the murdered man does in a dream/memory, and even the protagonist. The characters are in a way interchangeable, which makes them a bit less interesting.
And when one doesn't have characters to root for, it all becomes about the plot. This plot is loose and goofy but substantive enough to sustain two-thirds of the book. But at that point, the novel takes an odd turn, one that plays well with the kind of players all these people are but that blows all the suspense in the book and makes it, well, not terribly interesting anymore. One gets the sense that even the author isn't all that interested anymore, from the way the last few pages of the book go.
There's probably a lot here that is missing in translation. Footnotes explain some of the cultural context, some of which I knew but most of which I didn't. There are jokes that flew right by me, not being Chinese, references to classic works and authors. Such makes me appreciate all the more works that manage to speak to a person in translation, because they speak not just to the culture in which they arose but to the human experience. This book didn't really do that, even though it made a stab at trying to say something about identity and jokes and other human things; there wasn't, in the end, enough heart.
February 3, 2015
The first and only time I read a book by Wang Shou. It was 15 years ago and it was a lot of fun. I dont remember much more, except that it made me start thinking of China and Chinese people as more or less normal. More or less ;)
May 29, 2021
You know when you pass a stranger on the street and that same person appears in you dreams but then you pass by this person again only to find that all 3 people are completely different people. This book kinda felt like that. I couldn’t anchor to any one character as they were all shallow. Whenever it felt like we were getting somewhere in terms of character depth, it would change the direction. Overall I liked what the author was getting at and I’m amazed by how well this kind of attempt at storytelling came out quite clear. But did I enjoy the reading process..? Not really.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 17, 2022
I agree with a lot of what has been said in other reviews. I liked the style of the novel, and the comments on what was then a new generation of Chinese youth vastly different from their predecessors and born out of the Cultural Revolution. I just found the pace a bit too slow and the dreamy passages just a bit frustrating. By the end of it I didn't feel invested with Fan Yang and whether he committed the murder or not. Certainly not my favourite read this year, but for the wiritng itself I give three stars
March 25, 2025
It might be the fault of my fragmented reading schedule and lack of effort in keeping the characters straight in my head, but I really struggled to get through this book. I was quite interested for the first half, when we're still getting acquainted with everyone, and the police are tailing Fang Yang around, but I couldn't get my head around the second half, and I was a bit fed up by the end. I enjoyed "Please don't call me human" a lot more, because it managed to stay comprehensible even when it twisted and turned.
April 17, 2018
Part of the book felt like a hard boiled detective novel. Part of the book felt like one of those ethereal dreamlike novels the beats wrote back in the 50's where it was hard to figure out what was going on at any moment. Most of it is just a bunch of kids talking about taking over the world and bragging about how great they are. It really shouldn't have taken this long to read it, but it wasn't an exciting page turner either.
March 30, 2024
This didn't take that long to read, I just lost my book and it took a while to be able to check it out from the library.
Ultimately I am glad to have read some recent Chinese authors, but can't say I enjoyed this book.
It has a non-sequential timeline which confuses and makes the last part of the book a bit of a slog.
Also, the protagonist and his friends are not nice people ultimately and I was not at all invested in them.
Ultimately I am glad to have read some recent Chinese authors, but can't say I enjoyed this book.
It has a non-sequential timeline which confuses and makes the last part of the book a bit of a slog.
Also, the protagonist and his friends are not nice people ultimately and I was not at all invested in them.
Read
August 31, 2024A hooligan tries to solve the mystery of whether he killed his friend in a drunken weekend a decade past. Reminded me of Bolano in its focus on the down and out and the constant, ominous presence of memory.
May 24, 2023
Dreamlike imagery of wandering through the city.
February 2, 2024
我不太适合他的意识流~~~
Want to read
January 29, 2019Synopsis: a dark, disembodied, story of an anti-hero's search for the truth about a mysterious murder in the seamier side of Beijing.
Want to read
March 2, 2012"The Chinese author Wang Shuo (born 1958), who explored the genre [crime novel]in a novel translated into English as Playing for Thrills (2), was originally a television sitcom writer."
Interesting article on Chinese crime fiction in Le Monde Diplomatique -- "In China as elsewhere, crime fiction is a way to question society. But does it have a particularly Chinese flavour? The Chinese way of thinking is based on ideas of empty and full. When non-Chinese look at a container, they see the container itself, but the traditional Chinese view is to see the empty space it contains. This Taoist void shapes the world as it organises space in classical Chinese painting, where people are wisps in an immense landscape under an infinite sky. The individual cannot avoid being subject to the laws of nature and man, and must fit in with social harmony."
Interesting article on Chinese crime fiction in Le Monde Diplomatique -- "In China as elsewhere, crime fiction is a way to question society. But does it have a particularly Chinese flavour? The Chinese way of thinking is based on ideas of empty and full. When non-Chinese look at a container, they see the container itself, but the traditional Chinese view is to see the empty space it contains. This Taoist void shapes the world as it organises space in classical Chinese painting, where people are wisps in an immense landscape under an infinite sky. The individual cannot avoid being subject to the laws of nature and man, and must fit in with social harmony."
October 27, 2011
Haven't been this glad to see a book end in a while. I can safely say this book is NOT for me. The cover blurbage raving about a mind-blowing amazing Beijing noir voice notwithstanding, It did nothing for me. I can sense a skill and cleverness in this writer, but my god why didn't he make this as a movie instead? I think this has no business being a book. It is jumpy, independently minded, anti-authority, and chaotic. I would probably like it if it were a film. As a book it was more like Naked Lunch, although it made slightly more sense than that drivel, which, I might add, was much better as a movie. Sometimes while reading this it bothered me that I had no idea what was going on but other times I was so bored it hardly mattered.
October 26, 2007
Wangshuo became well known among college aged people in the late eighties and early nineties as probably the biggest name in the new literary movement called "pizi wenxue" (Chinese Thug(or maybe Bitch Face Literature sounds better) Writing). This is one of his only books ever translated into English. He is a prolific writer that also wrote the screen play for one of the coolest Chinese movies of the nineties, In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang Canlan de Rizi).
October 20, 2012
Whilst keen on China, its history and different perspectives of Chinese life, the book really didn't satisfy me in any way. It had some nice decriptions, interesting events happening to the characters, but i just couldn't really empathise with any of them or even wan to try to feel for them. The 'big build up' was frankly confusing to a degree, and though clever, was too disjointed and choppy for me.
October 7, 2008
I read this for school years ago, and REALLY liked it. You may need to have some understanding of history of communism in China to fully appreciate it ...
January 4, 2010
I couldn't get into this book. I am not an expert on modern Chinese culture, so this book was wasted on me.
May 21, 2024
3.5...she was dizzying and confusing but then very depressing if you take a second to think about it
April 27, 2018
I on page 160 but I am going to stop reading this book. it's continuing to annoy me rather than enchant me.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews