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...

• 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.