Published in 2015 and translated into English in 2018, The Day the Sun Died is the story of what happens to village in China that is plunged into everlasting night and widespread, violent insomnia.
Those afflicted initially wander aimlessly, with several wandering into irrigation ditches and drowning. As the night goes on, their behavior becomes more violent, leading them to maraud through the town, breaking into and ransacking stores, starting fights, and attacking others at the slightest imagined or real provocation. The story is told through the eyes of a young teenage boy whose family runs a store selling funerary accessories on the main thoroughfare.
The family sits at a series of complex intersections: the insomnia is initially a boon for business; they have historically been at least remotely involved in a scam whereby villagers were cremated instead of properly buried; and his father has been illegally saving the oil from the cremated corpses.
Considerations of life, of death, and of what in-between states may exist (sleep, somnambulism, insomnia, insanity) are paramount in the novel, but the story is really that of the teenage boy navigating a night full of unknown circumstances, threat, a brief romantic encounter, and not a little terror.
The author also makes an appearance–or, at least, a character who is a writer named Yan Lianke does. (According to the translator’s note, this is relatively common in Lianke’s fiction.)
The Day the Sun Died is an intellectually intriguing novel, and the question of what–if anything–it says about contemporary China persists long after reading, as do many of the individual scenes.
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