This novel by Zhang Yueran, a bestselling author in China from the “post-80s generation” – millennial to you and me – arrives in English on a wave of praise from Junot Díaz, Yan Lianke and Ian McEwan. Cocoon, translated by Jeremy Tiang, addresses the impact of the Cultural Revolution on China’s younger generations, and has the force of a story that needed to be told.
It takes the form of a present-day exchange between two old friends, not so much a conversation as alternating monologues. Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong excavate their family memories, starting with their grandfathers. Jiaqi’s grandad, once “the most famous heart surgeon in China”, is dying, and she is there to look after him and deliver bedpan duties: up to a point: “In order to test his willpower, I once stayed away for more than 10 hours, yet he managed not to soil himself.”
Gong’s grandfather, meanwhile, has lived in a persistent vegetative state (“his soul is trapped”) after a nail was driven into his skull while he was under arrest during the Cultural Revolution. Since then, “he just lay there, staring out of those expressionless eyes, taking unimaginably smelly shits”. But unlike Gong, the rest of the family has no desire for the man to recover. “If he’d died sooner, the hospital would have given us proper compensation,” says Gong’s granny, and his auntie isn’t keen either: “Then I’d be out of a job. I got my post in the hospital to replace your grandad.”
Zhang is interested in the impact of this act of violence on the extended family. “Granny didn’t know who to hate, so she hated everyone,” and “when grandad entered his vegetative state, his anger passed to my father”. Indeed Gong and Jiaqi’s fathers also loom large, when they’re there at all. Gong’s father is a violent drunk – “I was always watching Mom getting hit, and I saw her get used to it. All she asked was that he delay his violence until I’d fallen asleep” – and now Gong himself is someone who sees “soberness [as] a barrier that exists to be smashed”.
This legacy of generations, and how man hands on misery to man, is not cheerful, but at least Gong and Jiaqi have each other. This is important because, as children of China’s one-child policy, imposed in the 1980s, they are always lonely, especially when surrounded by memories.
Cocoon is a powerful report from a time and a generation little understood in the west, even if Gong’s and Jiaqi’s narratives are not always easy to tell apart and the almost baroque quality of the relentless familial angst can be suffocating. (This is the sort of book where someone can say: “Your dad and I are the same: twisted people who could only experience twisted love,” and it all seems normal – or perfectly abnormal.) Still, any writer who can invoke the great Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City and survive the comparison is one to be reckoned with.
Zhang has written that the book was a necessary “process of explanation and discovery” for her. (The nail in the skull was based on a real incident.) “No one needs this story. It’s only important to me,” she says, but we know that if you write a book that you need, and write it well enough, others will need it too.
• Cocoon by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang, is published by World Editions (£13.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
