Decoded, or nearly

Ma Jian was born in 1946 in Qingdao, Shandong Province. He published in 2009 comaBeijing Beijing Coma, a novel dedicated to the memory of the events of June 1989, banned in China. May Jia, whose real name Benhu Jiang, born in 1964 is much further south, in prosperous Zhejiang Province. He made his literary studies at a military academy located in Beijing and then he remained a member of the Chinese army for sixteen years. Returning to civilian life in 1997, he wrote novels that have sold a lot in China. It is since 2010 Vice President of the very official Association for arts and letters in this province. Decoded (2005) is his first book translated into English.

Decoded is an unclassifiable novel and for me its wide success does not thicken the mystery because despite attempts to present it as it is called in English a "page turner" (a book that turns the pages compulsively, the Because of its plot and the related pending), this is actually something else. His hero Rong Jinzhen is certainly become a mathematician cryptographer working for Chinese intelligence but Decoded see in a spy novel more would be completely simplistic and wrong.

The novel begins with a genealogy of the main character who is also a history of Chinese intellectuals and their contacts with the West, featuring a kind of collective heroes and trans-generational, the Department of Mathematics of the University N (the initial count a lot in the novel, and avoid specific references to places or countries). When Rong Jinzhen comes in, he is like the heir to a family tradition and we note that it is Westerners who will play a key role in his life, he who collects it and Liseiwicz January, a mathematician came to stay N. If the University knot of complex relationships between master and disciple, the cosmopolitan western and Chinese who never left his province, all in a Cold War context in which the most esoteric science is linked to questions hot. We will not forget their clash at chess, and the invention of a variant of this particularly intriguing game.

Through the figure of genius lost in ordinary life, which is not exactly a TuringAlan Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Movie The Imitation Game Chinese, through the issue of deciphering the codes, it is a picture of human loneliness and a kind of metaphysical fresco centered on the enigma of existence Mai Jia wanted to introduce ourselves. And it is the very close link between China's evocation daily (the campuses, offices, administrative hierarchies, not of factories and rice fields) and a painting of the finitude of the mind battling unintelligibility of the world that gives its fragrance strange novel, a novel both gray and ominous, that small-steam ahead, takes place on the appearance of a police investigation, and progress towards a solution of less than toward even more puzzles strangeness.