Ling Xi left her native China in 1998 to attend a major Parisian business school, she then worked in financial companies. She is the author in French of several fictions: “Été strident” (Actes Sud, 2006), “The Third Half” (Maurice Nadeau, 2010) and “L’Épaule du cavalier” (Maurice Nadeau, 2016). His new novel “Gorge des Tambours” has just been published by Verdier.
“In the town of Old Ficus in the fifties, all the boys despise Mu Er, for her androgynous beauty, and all the boys are in love with her Sixth Sister, for the same reason. The Sixth Sister Mu, who loves only Wang Wen, however, did not respond to her declaration of love and married a stranger in 1959, whom she followed to a distant desert.After her departure, Wang Wen, by dint of contemplating the features of the beloved in the face of his friend Mu Er, ends up having troubled feelings for him. Become an engineer officer in 1965, Wang Wen will not return from the place of his assignment. On the news of his death seven years later, Mu Er asks for the hand of the sister of the deceased, Wang Ran, the tomboy who has his brother’s manly ways.
Many years later, Mu Er has mysteriously disappeared and it is various narrators, from the Mu and Wang families, who follow one another to, around their own obsessions, testify and lead the investigation.
In this fresco which spans more than a century of Chinese history and reflects the conditioning of individuals, the control of instincts and the alienation of guilt-ridden minds, we follow three generations of characters – grandfathers corpse fishers; the named Bellissime who gives birth to five daughters before giving birth to a son, thus avoiding repudiation; Mu Yi, the long-distance sailor, whose face is astonishingly reminiscent of that of his Gris-gris parrot; la Grêlée, mother of the beautiful Wang Wen…
Games of mirrors with multiple reversals, private dramas against the backdrop of a century of turmoil and puritanism pushed to the point of terror. A song to great failed loves, to the pain of hope, to heroic joy in the darkest hours of adversity.” (Presentation of Verdier editions)