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If things go right, I think we’ll be running five reviews this week—which definitely makes up for the one we skipped last week.

Up first is Yu Hua’s Brothers, a very long novel, very ambitious novel about two boys growing up in China during the period of the Cultural Revolution and the economic boom that followed.

The novel opens with a frame story of Baldy Li, Liu Town���Ĵ�ý�s most successful businessman, sitting on a gold-plated toilet seat, dreaming of spending ���Ĵ�ý�twenty million U.S. dollars to purchase a ride on a Russian Federation space shuttle for a tour of outer space.���Ĵ�ý� He begins reminiscing about his now-deceased brother Song Gang, and about the time when, as a young boy, Baldy Li peeked under the partition in the public toilet and saw five women���Ĵ�ý�s butts, including the butt of Lin Hong, the most desired woman in Liu Town.

From that point on, the novel advances in a linear fashion, describing how Baldy Li figures out how to sell his description of Lin Hong���Ĵ�ý�s bottom to various townsmen for bowls of noodles, of how Baldy���Ĵ�ý�s mother remarried and Song Gang comes into Baldy���Ĵ�ý�s life, of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and of how Baldy Li goes on to become one of the richest people in China, capable of spending millions on a trip to space.

Along the way, there are endless reverses of fortune���Ĵ�ý�Song Gang ends up marrying Lin Hong, Baldy Li���Ĵ�ý�s grand schemes bankrupt him and lead him to collecting trash���Ĵ�ý�and numerous side stories that give this novel a sort of Dickensian quality, allowing Yu Hua to really sketch out Chinese society both during and after Mao. The epic scope of the novel, along with Hua���Ĵ�ý�s ability to shift from warm humor to sheer horror in the same sentence, are the real high points of this book. It���Ĵ�ý�s easy to get sucked into Hua���Ĵ�ý�s world, even when the reader knows exactly what���Ĵ�ý�s going to happen next, which is true a good deal of the time.

Click here to read the full review.