Coloratura

Ge Ren, an intellectual swept up in China's revolution and civil war, is known to be dead, but no one agrees on how he died or on who he really was, whether a hero or a spy, a Nationalist or a Communist, a poet or a man of learning. Decades later, his last living descendant sets out to find the truth. She brings together the testimony of three witnesses, each telling the story in his own voice and for his own reasons, along with a mass of quotations and documents, some real and some perhaps invented. Their accounts follow Ge Ren's short life, his politics and his loves from Yan'an, Mao's base, to Russia and Japan, while the reader begins to wonder what the compiler herself is after. The novel is a puzzle about one man's fate and about how history gets told.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

333 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

China

First published

2002 by People's Literature Publishing House

Author's age

36 when first published

ISBN

9787020037001 (original)

9780806144238 (University of Oklahoma Press, United States)