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    Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
    Unavailable
    Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
    Unavailable
    Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
    Audiobook7 hours

    Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch

    Written by Dai Sijie

    Narrated by B. D. Wong

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Following his runaway best seller, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie gives us a delightful new tale of East meets West: an adventure both wry and uplifting about a love of dreams and the dream of love, and the power of reading to sustain and inspire the spirit.

    After years of studying Freud in Paris, Mr. Muo returns home to introduce the blessings of psychoanalysis to twenty-first-century China. But it is his hidden purpose-to liberate his university sweetheart, now a political prisoner-that leads him to the sadistic local magistrate, Judge Di. The price of the Communist bureaucrat's clemency? A virgin maiden. And so our middle-aged hero Muo, a Westernized romantic and sexual innocent himself, sets off on his bicycle in search of a suitable girl.

    Muo's quest will take him from a Chengdu mortuary to a rural panda habitat, from an insane asylum to the haunts of the marauding Lolo people. Along the way, he will lose a tooth, his virginity, and his once unshakable faith in psychoanalytic insight. But his quixotic idealism will not waver, even as he comes to see that the chivalrous heart may have room for more than one true love.

    Dai Sijie's exuberant, touching-and most unlikely-romance is a triumph of unbridled imagination, a celebration of the yearning spirit.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 7, 2005
    ISBN9780739320556
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch

    3/5

    135 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Bizarre story, quirky characters - not at all sure it was a comedy, maybe black. People and places vividly describe - could be a good movie?
    • 3/5
      Dai Sijie's style is unmatched. His writing is quirky, descriptive and funny. He possesses the gift of painting a picture with his words without ever being heavy-handed. I discovered his marvelous writing with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, and I've re-discovered it with Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch.Mr. Muo is an interesting character. I've never come across a character quite like him, and I don't think I ever will again. He is the perfect blend of East and West, and he knows it. Muo is perfectly imperfect, likable while still managing to be revolting and disconcerting at times.With every chapter, the story took a new turn. This book contained so many surprises and unexpected events that I could never predict what was going to happen next. Despite the multiple plot twists, this is not a thriller or mystery novel, but rather a sequence of peculiar happenings in the life of a peculiar man. The narrative moves along quickly and will easily pull you in.The basis of the novel is that Muo, China's first psychoanalyst, is trying to free the woman he loves from prison. The story is so much more, though. Muo is a student of Freud, and it's apparent in his view of the world and the chronicle of his life. I would consider this to be quite the Freudian tale!My rating of this book is a 3-3.5/5. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but it's a little light for my tastes. This may have been a better book to read in the summer or between more serious, thought-provoking works. Still, I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a light, humorous and odd little tale.
    • 2/5
      I was fairly disappointed in reading this book. It was one of those books I felt like the plot ideas were all in place to make a phenomenal book, and is one that's great to tell people about because of those ideas. Unfortunately, the execution left something to be desired. The characters never drew me in and there were a ton of loose ends throughout.
    • 4/5
      A bitter-sweet, funny, sensitively written story of a Chinese psychoanalyst's return from Paris back to his homeland. His incredible, unusual, if prosaic, adventures made me smile and feel for him. His devotion to Freud's teachings and his desire to analyze dreams of everyone he meets, as a tool to find a way to his long lost and imprisoned love interest, is touching. I bought this book after seeing that it was written by the author of "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" - I had seen a movie based on that book and rather enjoyed it. I was not disappointed by this book either. Translation from French by Ina Rilke seems quite masterful. A beautiful piece of writing altogether.
    • 5/5
      What a romp! Travel along with Mr. Muo, China's only registered psychoanalyst as he seeks a virgin in China to offer as a bribe to a crooked judge, in order to free his friends, "The Embalmer" and "Volcano of the Old Moon" from wrongful imprisonment. Along the way, you will roar with laughter at the dry wit of the author as he offers such tidbits as popular children's songs from the Revolutionary Re-Education period which laud the joy of Communism. Also, enjoy the dream analysis offered by our Mr. Muo as he takes his office on the road. Step into the inner dream and fantasy world of Mr. Muo, whose training in France has enhanced his openness to his own stream of consciousness........Marvelous!
    • 4/5
      What a strange little book! I felt like I was struggling my way through it at times, only to look up and notice that 30 pages had passed by. It was wordy at times, but it was okay. I truely was interested in it because I LOVED Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress. This book didn't measure up for me, but it was alright. That's about all I have to say about it.....
    • 2/5
      A look at psychiatry in China. The comic misadventures of French trained Chinese psychiatrist who returns home to recue his love. Psychiatry at odds with the encounters Mr Muo experiences. Didn't work for me and not in the same street as "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress."
    • 4/5
      Sijie's first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, is about finding hidden beauty in the midst of oppression. Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch, set in commercial boom of modern-day Chengdu, is about the moral depravity lurking on the other side of freedom. When Muo's college sweetheart is imprisoned for political reasons, he returns from Paris to secure her freedom. When the judge demands a night with an adolescent virgin, Muo is initially optimistic that he can find one...but the China of 2006 is not the China Muo left behind, as he discoveres when woman after woman tells him of selling her love for a job or a ticket away from her village. Sijie is a master of show-don't-tell storytelling and the book never loses its comic tone even as desperation leaves Muo as corrupt as the judge he seeks to bribe. This hidden depravity is what I think Sijie wants us to see about China -- that beneath the veneer of economic freedom, the old order of things remains untouched; without the freedom to fight back, every day people become complicit in its evil.
    • 1/5
      I hated this; so much so that I stopped listening halfway through.What especially irritated me was that, after having Muo repeatedly states that psychoanalysis is not fortune-telling, pretty much every dream that he ever analyzes is nothing but fortune-telling; certainly his interpretations sound more like something out of Joseph (of the technicolor dreamcoat) than Freud. I persisted till halfway in the hope that I would learning something about the feel of modern China, but given that Sijie either does not understand psychoanalysis, or is willing to pervert his understanding for the sake of the story, I'm not much prepared to trust his interpretation of China.
    • 1/5
      I found Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch to be a disjointed, vaguely plotted book. I did not enjoy it and forced myself to finish it because I was reading it for book club. I kept hoping to find the humor in it since written on the back cover was how funny it was but I never found the humor. I don't know if I'll read this author again.