Acel om care plecase din Tongzhen în 1873 într-o barcă neagră cu tendă, pen-
tru a-și face studiile în străinătate, era cel mai mic membru din a șaptea generație a
renumitei familii de negustori de sare, clanul Rong din Jiangnan. Când a plecat, se
numea Rong Zilai, dar când se întoarse din străinătate purta deja alt nume: John
Lili. Mai târziu, oamenii au spus că el fusese primul care înlăturase mirosul jilav de
sare din porii familiei sale și-l înlocuise cu mireasma uscată a cărților și cu un aer
de Om Ales¹ care-și iubește țara. Desigur, legătura dintre această transformare și
anii petrecuți în străinătate era de netăgăduit. Totuși, când cei din familia Rong l-au
ales pe el să plece la studii în afară n-a fost pentru a schimba din temelii destinul
clanului, ci pentru că ei sperau ca asta să o ajute pe Bunica Rong să mai trăiască
încă puțin.
În tinerețe, Bunica Rong fusese o mamă desăvârșită. În două decade dădu
naștere la nouă fii și șapte fiice, toți reușind să ajungă la vârsta maturității. Fiii și fii-
cele acestea au fost cei care, cu multă trudă, au pus temeliile averii familiei Rong și
au pironit-o pe Bunica Rong pe treapta cea mai înaltă din ierarhia clanului. Mul-
țumită atenției și grijii copiilor și nepoților, Bunica Rong a trăit mult și bine, însă
viața ei n-a fost una tihnită.

This book is the perfect proof of the significant differences between Western and Eastern thinking. It's structure, style and methods of telling a story deeply differ from what we're used to in Western novels. This may be why it was so strange and slow for me to read. In no way is this novel a thriller, as it is marketed. It is more a philosophical and psychological look at the price genius, of being an outsider, of being different. Even though it has its merits, I found myself emotionally detached from the story. The enjoyment was mainly intellectual, and this isn't enough for me these days.

This book had a great start, very captivating. Rong Jizhen’s family story and the way he appears on the book are very good, and keep the aura of mystery and awe around the plot.
However, the mystery never really unveils, and we are left in a weird limbo without any resolution, and the end of the story, if there is actually one, is very anti-climactic. The 2 last parts of the book feel detached from the rest, and shed no new light to it. it was of those books I would have loved to love, but it just felt short.

Decoded is a novel that mainly follows the life of Rong Jinzhen, a very intelligent yet incredibly stoic person, who through the course of the story becomes one of the most esteemed code-breakers in the Chinese secret service. The book takes the reader through the lives of his ancestors, his childhood, adulthood and school years, and finally his life working for Unit 701.

Well, I personally was not able to click with this book at all. The writing was incredibly long winded and so many parts of the story could have easily been left out completely and it would not have changed anything. The pacing of the story was a bit odd as well. I was expecting most of the story to focus on the main character’s life working as a spy, but most of the time, the reader was just given, in very extensive detail, an overview of his life leading up to his job.

Something that was a bit off putting about this, was that there was absolutely no tension or suspense about any aspect of the story. One would expect the story to lead up to something horrific or grand in the end. I guess the author did try to do it by having Jinzhen lose his sanity and his revered intelligence, however “the descent into madness” was not surprising or intriguing at all. It just felt hollow.

As I already mentioned, the pacing was also a bit off. Even the blurb of the story makes it seem like the entire story is centered around the main character’s life amongst espionage specialists. Yet, the most interesting part of the novel for me was the beginning, when the reader got to learn about this long and sometimes quite tragic backstory of a Chinese family. At times, it even felt like there could have been some supernatural forces at work, which honestly, would have made this book a million times more worth something.

Moreover, even now I do not know what the point of the story was supposed to be. What did the stories about Rong Jinzhen’s life mean? By the end of the book, even the narrator said that “It’s okay if you skip this part of the book,” and I was very happy to oblige. When I finally got to the end, I was not even happy, I just felt like I had wasted too much time.

I know that all of my criticism could be derived from the fact that this book was a translated version, so of course a lot of nuances and aspects are going to be lost. Nonetheless, this was really not for me, even though I had high hopes for it.

So, what is it that I could take away from all of this? Probably that if the description of a book says that it has math in it and you hate math then maybe you should not pick it up :)

I feel like the blurb sold a completely different book than what this was. I was expecting a much more straightforward novel about encryption and decoding and maybe some Cold War stuff in between, but this book had next to none of that. This was a disguised biography (of someone who doesn't exist, of course), told by other people. The beginning was somewhat confusing with so much focus on families and generations and if you are not familiar with Chinese names, especially nicknames, you're going to lose track fast like I did. And then so much maths, which I might have enjoyed if it wasn't drowned in flowery prose. I really wish there had been much more stuff about actually breaking codes, about the work, instead of vague "he broke the code, and everything is top secret so you get bits and pieces that have very little to do with anything interesting". This could have been good. And don't come tell me it's just slow and not a western spy novel - Le Carre might be western, and slow, but his books work.

Read my review here: http://mwgerard.com/books-for-april/

This is a character study set against international intrigue (in the form of cryptography). The main character is an autistic mathematical genius. Much of the theme of the book is an attempt to understand genius--how it works, what can support or detract from its functioning especially in an isolated individual. As I undertstand it, high functioning autistic savants strongly focus on one interest, which in a sense Jenzhin does but I also sensed that to be successful at decrypting code, he had to have a broad understanding of literature, at least.
I am curious about the translation at least in one area, a number of cities and institutions are identified by a letter, for example N University. As I understand there is no direct translation from a Chinese character to a phonetic letter, so I wonder what the author's intention was for these institutions, cities, countries etc.

Disappointing finish to what was an interesting character study at the beginning. Basically I enjoyed the book until Jinzhen was taken from the university and brought to the cryptography section. Here the book loses all momentum, there is no cool spy stuff, the author treats us like idiots incapable of grasping any technical aspect of the work and merely throws out some ridiculous analogies to explain the code breaking, propagandist phrases about sacrificing for the nation enter the work (can't tell if these were supposed to be ironic, but I assumed they were not), and all the characters introduced from here on are flat and uninteresting. Probably would have enjoyed the work quite a bit more if they would have left Jinzhen and his father working on the artificial intelligence question.