The Adventures of Mao on the Long March

By Frederic Tuten

Book Overview

An icon of literature as American Pop Art, Frederic Tuten's Adventures of Mao on the Long March is a triumphantly witty and subversive novel. The New York Times called it "almost too good to be true." Tuten's deadpan textbook narrative of Mao's Long March is peppered with loving parodies of Hemingway, Kerouac, Dos Passos, and Malamud. As John Updike comments, the book includes "twenty-seven pages of straight history of the Long March (October 1934-October 1935), done in a neutral, factual tone, as by a fellow-traveling Readers Digest...thirty-six and a half pages of quotations in quotation marks...and twenty-six pages of what might be considered normal novelistic substance--imaginary encounters and conversation. For an example: 'a tank, covered with peonies and laurels, advances towards him. Mao thinks the tank will crush him, but it clanks to a halt. The turret rises, hesitantly. Greta Garbo, dressed in red sealskin boots, red railway-man's cap, and red satin coveralls, emerges. She speaks: "Mao, I have been bad in Moscow and wicked in Paris, I have been loved in every capital, but I have never seen a MAN whom I could love. That Man is you, Mao, Mao mine." Mao considers this dialectically. The woman is clearly mad. Yet she is beautiful and the tank seems to work.'"

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811216322
• ISBN13: 9780811216326
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Of course it is history: it elegantly fooled Partisan Review

I read this book in the seventies. Its depiction of Mao was accurate and fascinating as to Mao's almost hallucinatory erudition. Of course it left out his brutal, autocratic side; it Caesarized him. I do not regard this as a flaw. Tuten was not trying to sell Mao or Maoism, but to open a magic door into his complex, vivid world. The interview portion was excellent; it fooled the Partisan review, which was quite miffed when it could not publish it as a true interview. It is a history of a facet of Mao's imagination: he had an amazing capacity to realize what he could imagine. Tuten makes this clear in Western terms, doing us all a service. His writing is imaginative and vital, and when you read the book you cannot imagine being elsewhere.