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“... made deliberately to run counter to ‘the reality that ordinary people understand’. Baotown by Wang Anyi is more representative, for it makes fewer compromises with this parody of what the West calls ‘literature’. Its creation of a peasant village is lucid, sparse, externalised, succinct. Even the mad, like Bao Bingde’s wife, rediscover sanity ...”

“... gazing at the super-malls on Nanjing Lu and the throbbing neon lights of Pudong. The novelist Wang Anyi, sitting in the lobby of my hotel in one of the kitsch towers of Pudong, said: ‘There is no culture here!’ I’m not sure culture is what’s wanted in this sleek new part of the city, built in less than a decade on the once desolate mudflats ...”

“... could write large, ambitious novels of the sort that many in his generation – Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi – would write in the 1990s and 2000s. Big Breasts and Wide Hips, a family saga that runs from the turn of the 20th century up to the early post-Mao period, confirms that this capacity was beyond him. Rather than evading death and atrocity, as Mo ...”