Brilliant, unusual journey through the mind of a Chinese cryptologist. Elegantly written and translated. Unlike anything I've read. Caveat:. The last, small chapter is surreal and suggests the availability to the author and Editor of "special" mushrooms.

While I loved the first 100 pages, with its reasonably structured narrative - although the generational hops and characters changing names were the sort of challenge I expected reading Chinese fiction - the end of the book was just scattered and barely intelligible. Very disappointing. I guess this is how difficult, say, David Foster Wallace would be in translation. Except that DFW is convincing, whereas the maths and especially cryptography references in this felt like pure nonsense.

Interesting.

interesting book looking more at the person's life than a book really on cryptography but shows more an intelligent man's descent into madness while he searches for the answers. maybe some of the book also lost in translation too.

My first impression was this book is wrongly catagorized as "spy-thriller" genre in its english edition. In my mind, this book belonged in magical realism genre. It has all the marks, i.e. the abundance of background, the story line that spans over generations and of course the supranatural element in form of dreaming and dreams interpretations. Reading the blurp I was expecting for one thing, and then fondly surprised to found another. It was like [b:One Hundred Years of Solitude|320|One Hundred Years of Solitude|Gabriel García Márquez|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327881361l/320._SX50_.jpg|3295655], cryptographic-chinese style.

The main story was about an unfortunate man, a math-genius, who worked as a cryptograper, succesfully decoding (almost) two high-level ciphers code, PURPLE and BLACK, and in the end being consumed by them. But like I said before, this was a magical reality, so the story naturally began with his great-great-great grandmother having a dream!

Written in mixed style of narative and epistolary, the secret personality of Rong Jizhen was slowly decoded. His sad beginning of life, the odd childhood, the family who in the end had to be separated, his amazing works, and the ill-fated end of life. Wretched wretched fate he had.

This is a sad and tragic story, but just like Borges or Gabo would tell one, it's just life, and its beautiful on its own way.

Just my two cents about the back bone of the story, well, I did took cryptography for one class back in univ, and by the end of the semester, I didn't fancy it. Yeah, it was just very basic knowledge, and it was hard and all, but more than that, I felt the sharp coldness around it. To work, to decode things his entire adult life, not to mention the secrecy and the burden, no wonder that these people cracks under pressure. Reminds me of Alan Turing in the movie The Imitation Game or John Nash in The Beautiful Mind.


*Reading this as a part of #AsianReadaton 2020 Challenge 1, read a book by Asian author. This is my first time reading the work of author Mai Jia, and I quite pleased by it. But really, I don't think that the english translation is good enough to transfer all the oriental chinese nuance. Imho.

** Books 279 - 2015 **

This books to accomplish New Author Reading Challenge 2015

3,4 of 5 stars!

Review to be continued. XD

spent half of the book just explaining the 1000 years prior to present events happening to the main character.... i didn't hate it, just didn't find it all very important to tell to us readers? also, who is the narrator? i'm alright with it being anonymous, but it was explicitly explained that the narrator's related to one of the characters in the book, or at least, a figurine. Also, the whole purpose of the book was to show us how a genius can meet his own demise if they take the wrong way down the road, but to be honest, it was a weak way and wasn't enough to make me sympathize with him, and the whole "plot twist" of Mr. Lieswich (?) was boring, predictable, and overall just made the story bland.

Basically :
a genius woman gave birth to a demon child. said demon child impregnate a stranger, then died. said stranger ended up dying after giving birth to a descendant of said genius, then grew up to become a secret agent (cryptographer) and cracked a code made by his professor when he was in university, and ended up losing his briefcase filled with secrets of another code because he fell asleep, and upon finding it, went completely mad. and then probably died, idk, didn't really pay attention at the last 50 pages of the book.

Conclusion :
Vasili was a terrible bodyguard. I bet that he was the traitor and thief this whole time.