Desert Rites

Desert Rites is a realistic depiction of China's rural life in the second half of the twentieth century,and epitomises a generation of farmers to struggle for survival and fate.It takes the author Xuemo twenty years to write this novel.

There are no great figures in this book.What touches people most are those scenes that depict little details in daily life.and those parts about the struggle of soul that each life goes through when confronted with sufferings from reality. The whole book was written in a Tolstoy-like style,Focusing on vividly depicting the characters’ psychological life.It faithfully chronicled a reforming era and one year’s life of a farmer family in western China.For example, faced with life’s harship,faced with love that is unlikely to come to fruition,Lingguang, the hero of the book, witnessed a family’s history of suffering,and witnessed the souls of a Generation who were inhopeless silence and helpless struggle on the land of western China.

Finally, under the helpless trace,Lingguang chose to leave his hometown,heading towards the solitude in mind that no one ever know.The whole novel portrays human nature in ordinary life, and is a representative work of realism in contemporary Chinese literature that faithfully records the customs and cultures of western China.

In 2016,the prominent translator Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-chun Lin completed the English translation of the novel.

Up till now,in China,five different publishers have published different versions of Desert Rites. The following people will like this book:Those who want to know what the society and people’s life were actually like in 1970s China,and those who want to break the “magical spell” of life to elevate their life to a higher level.