It seems plain to me that I just don't get mysteries as written by Chinese authors. Previously, I had read A Pair of Jade Frogs by Ye Xin and I struggled with it as well. The problem for me is pacing and expectations--I realize this is absolutely my problem and no reflection on the authors at all (thus, I have not given a star rating to this novel--it wouldn't be fair). Decoded takes forever to get to the main kernel of the story--namely the problem highlighted in the first paragraph of the synopsis above. The synopsis that grabbed my attention and caused me to pick this up at the library.

The entire first half of the novel (perhaps even a bit more) is taken up in a minutely-detailed exposition of Jinzhen's ancestry--his family and all the details surrounding them and his birth and who he his and where he came from and where they lived and how they made riches from salt and how they lost their wealth and.... And--by the time we actually got around to the meat of the story I found I had no interest at all. Is there a need for an explanation of Jinzhen's background? Absolutely. Is there a need to go into such mind-numbing detail? In my opinion, absolutely not--because by the time I had made my way through the first half Mia Jia had lost this reader. And the intrigue of the thriller never brought me back.

Readers who are more capable at discarding preconceived notions about the pacing of a mystery/thriller may thoroughly enjoy this novel--and judging by the rating on Goodreads that is absolutely possible. I am sorry it wasn't possible for me.

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block. Please request permission before reposting. Thanks!

lthough, Decoded blurb and reviews considered the book to be a thriller, it is surely not a thriller in the traditional sense. It is a languid and intriguing story of a mathematical genius who worked for a top secret cryptography unit of Chinese government. However, this is surely worth a read for its beautiful, poignant and intelligent portrayal of a life of a mathematics genius.

http://santoshsingh.net/decoded-an-unusual-thriller/

This book is about math, about chess, about cryptography, about a lonely soul. Unfortunately, this book knows very little about math, about chess, or about cryptography. It is painfully obvious to an informed reader when Mai Jia is just - needlessly - making things up, when he is ill-informed about the subject matter.

This might not matter if the book offered psychological insights into the lonely soul. But it doesn't. It merely offers a slightly off-beat character who goes from one task to the next, repeatedly telling us "THIS GUY IS REALLY, REALLY SMART!" occasionally offering up non-sensical (in the context of the story) plot points.

It is unclear how much of this is due to the translation, and how much to the original author; but this version of the book is the one that I read. Quite a disappointment.

Fascinating and quirky. I felt as if I were reading a travelogue or a true story. In fact, I kept searching for things on the internet to see if they were true.

Surprised at the philosophical nature of math and this book.

Um livro que conta a vida de um criptografo de alto nível. Conquista pela história pessoal dele. No fundo, baseia-se em alguma factos históricos mas com nomes falsos. É um livro de ficção com muitos factos verdadeiros, relatado como se fosse uma investigação sobre a vida desse criptografo.

Good beginning but too flat and repetitive

Educating Genius

Mai Jia is a Chinese Borges. Using documents presented as factual he constructs a fiction that is the truth of a culture. For Borges, it was European culture and its influence in South America that was a primary topic. In Mai's case the culture is that of China: driven, obsessive, clever, and secretive. The relationship between Europe and China is more complex than what Borges had to deal with, and Mai has come up with a brilliant metaphor in cryptography to investigate that complexity.

Some of the most interesting parts of Decoded are about what is presumed to need no explanation: the significance of family-relations, the necessity to sacrifice oneself for the national good, an acceptance of the fateful chance involved in life, the spiritualisation of chance as divinely sourced luck, and the reluctance to challenge authority as unjust, balanced by a profound sense of fairness. This is the sort of existential backdrop of things that just 'are' in China. These 'gaps' make the metaphor both more pointed and more compelling.

Ostensibly, Decoded is about the life and fate of an autistic mathematical savant, the bastard child of a family of intellectuals. He, like China itself, is passed from one controlling authority to another. Each transfer involves a renaming as well as new conditions of existence. He is even somewhat 'Christianised' into a distinctly Pauline view of the relation between life and after-life. Crucially, he is intellectually influenced most by a foreign mathematician who is married to a Chinese woman and enculturated deeply into the country. Through him, the savant is drawn into the life of the mind and into decades-long cultural as well as cryptographic warfare.

The Chinese ability to temporise about their history is presented as a rule of the game of cryptography. Knowing history is only confusing for a cryptographer, the author contends. It makes progress difficult by trapping one's thinking in the past, in the patterns that have already been established and discarded as obsolete. The invasion by Japan and its horrors are, therefore, footnotes to the main story; the Korean War mentioned en passant; the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are asides; the emergence of entrepreneurial China doesn't merit even a comment.

The other "Iron-clad rule" in ciphers, according to Mai, is that one should never attempt to be on both sides of a code. A good encryptor risks not just his talent but also his sanity by engaging in decryption; and vice-versa. The message, perhaps to Chinese authority, is plain: the ability to confuse others is incompatible with an ability to understand what others are really up to. The attempt to do both provokes cultural madness. Pointedly, the key to the most profound cipher of the time is that there is no key: The cryptographic key was the number zero! It was nothing! Absolute nothing! ... a cipher with no key."

The protagonist's internal state, his personality, is never revealed. He is incomprehensible, inscrutable even, to everyone he has known and worked with, including government officials. He is admired for his achievements, but also feared for his unpredictable behaviour. He is intimate with no one, among other reasons because his intelligence is so oppressively off-putting. One of his notebooks shows him to be a hidden religious obsessive. The protagonist's doctoral thesis considers mankind as the irrational number Pi, an eternal constant but ultimately indeterminant. China anyone?

Mai summarises his cultural perceptions in the mouth of one code-breaker,

"With respect to those working in cryptography, our collective fate is naturally tied up with the various games of chess – especially those with commonplace lives. Finally they will all be seduced by the art of chess, just like pirates and drug pushers are seduced by their own wares. It is just like how some people become interested in good works in their old age."

With this, Mai signals, subtly but clearly, a recognition of the generational differences that exist in China, as well as the tension between the Party-insiders and the rest of the population.

"Genius and madness issue forth from the same track; both are brought about by bewitchment," says the same decoder. Perhaps this is Mai's central message to his compatriots. As one of the main symptoms of democratic politics, this warning about bewitchment seems particularly apt at the moment to European culture as well.

Сучасний китайський роман про геніального математика, який у часи культурної революції працював у спецслужбах дешифрувальником. Цікавий тут не сюжет, а сама форма. Це вже 90-і, коли оповідач дізнається про невідомого героя Жона Дзіньдженя і починає збирати матеріал, щоб написати про нього книжку. Роман і є результатом його праці. У ньому історія родини Жонів, якій присвячено перший розділ, міцно переплітається з подальшою долею головного героя. Текст — це така собі стилізіція під художню документалку із розшифровками розмов, тобто про Дзіньдженя ми знаємо лише з вуст інших людей і розвідок оповідача-автора. У "додатку" нам лишають кілька записів із нотатника головного героя, і це вперше ми можемо хоч трохи зрозуміти його почуття.
Читається на одному подиху, віддам належне. Додатковим плюсиком є тематика криптоаналізу (у тексті згадуються Пурпуровий та Чорний шифри). Утім в деяких моментах патріотизм зашкалює, я попередила.

Повний відгук тут.