Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch

By: Dai Sijie

Narrated by: B.D. Wong

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.

©2005 Dai Sijie (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Fans of Dai Sijie's Balzac will adore this enchanting adventure story." —Chicago Tribune

“Always entertaining. . . . A bawdy, comic romp [that] takes our hero into all kinds of wild scrapes and adventures.” —San Francisco Chronicle

"Poignant. . . . Hilarious. . . . A fascinating book." —San Jose Mercury News

Artful and poingnant

It took me a while to understand what the author was trying to say but when I did, I found the story poignant in the manner of Sophie's Choice and artfully done.

This author does not make it easy for the listener but, for me, the story was worth the extra work

I am so confused!

OK, so it's about a Freudian psychoanalyst in post-revolution China. He eats, sleeps, and drinks sex, and I got very tired of it very early on. The observations about China were interesting, and some of the character development was fine, but I would not recommend this to my friends.

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch

Disappointing.

Another wonderful story by this author

His unique way of writing makes his stories remarkable. His other book Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress is my all time favorite.