A Chinese Don Quixote, tangled in myth, misadventure
Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
By Dai Sijie
Translated, from the French, by Ina Rilke
Knopf, 287 pp., $22
Mr. Muo returns to China after years in Paris studying the theories of Freud and Lacan. His dream is to transform his country through psychoanalysis. Instead, he finds himself tangled in ancient Chinese myth and melodrama only thinly disguised under a contemporary veneer.
Dai Sijie has written a kind of picaresque fantasy about the dumpy, hapless, and nerdy Mr. Muo riding the rails, hitching lifts, and bicycling about China flourishing a banner inscribed ''Interpreter of Dreams." It soon becomes evident -- not that anything is very evident in a novel that blurs its own tracks as soon as it makes them -- that his purpose is not mainly to diffuse psychoanalytic enlightenment.
Rather, it is to free his girlfriend from prison, where she was sent for taking photographs of police abuse and passing them to the foreign press. Muo hopes to bribe the judge, an obscenely demonic figure, by finding him a virgin to ravish between intervals of gorging on fatty food and three-day mah-jongg marathons. Surely (the up-to-date veneer steadily peels off the old dragons underneath), itinerant dream analysis will turn up a virgin or two.
Sijie has lived and worked in Paris for the past 20 years: his first novel, ''Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," was a runaway success in France and did reasonably well here. Perhaps it would be presumptuous to wonder whether in the new novel, at least, he shows himself out of touch with his country, rendering it through an excessively precious literary optic. Certainly he is very much in touch with -- all but wired to -- the disassociative, shape-shifting style currently favored in some Western European writing.
Disassociation marks the helter-skelter succession of Muo's adventures. Cloud adventures is more like it; they appear, thin out, and blow away. Some segue into waking dreams and return to dreaming wakefulness. On a train he climbs under a seat with a young woman, offers psychoanalysis, wonders about her virginity, gets no response, and discovers in the morning that she's stolen his suitcase and shoes.
Trying to approach Judge Di, Muo mistakes an escaped lunatic for the judge. Badly beaten, he in turn is mistaken for the lunatic and taken to the asylum, where he impresses with his discourses on Freud. He escapes; in fact he makes three escapes in the course of a novel that often seems to escape from itself as well as from the reader.
With no clear connection to anything else, Muo finds himself bobbing in the water near a seaside crab restaurant. On his dream-peddling, virgin-seeking bicycle tour he climbs to the roof of a tall building, bicycle on his back. The watchman relates a friend's dream of beheading; Muo, in a daft exercise of proxy analysis, predicts that the watchman will contract throat cancer. Indeed the dream interpreting is closer to ancient soothsaying than to Freud.
Failing in his quest and facing a grave hymeneal deficit, Muo enlists a neighbor whom he is psychoanalyzing by phone. Her husband, who was gay, killed himself on their wedding night. Presumably the Embalmer, as she is called (she is one, in fact), will virginally qualify. It all turns disastrous when Judge Di apparently dies, is taken for embalming, wakes up in a rage, pummels Muo bloody, and makes off. And here is Muo:
''He assesses the damage: a bloodied face like the hero in a Western or a film about a boxer, and sopping trousers like the Russian director in the Kremlin's screening room." And he tells himself: ''Not bad, Muo. Here you are, the two global superpowers united within you."
It is a sample of Muo's ooze of faintly miscued reference, sprouting from a mental landscape of literary and pop-culture tags. (Westerner heroes don't bleed. It would take too long to explain the Russian director.)
The encounters multiply. Muo loses his own virginity to the Embalmer in a scene of thrashing sex and spilled flour that turns her, he notes in mid-orgasm, into one of Picasso's distorted portraits. He goes on to describe others. ''Muo's first copulation, which proceeds in textbook fashion, is in danger of turning into a doctoral thesis."
The virgin search continues; there are chases, escapes, bandits, new candidates, a grisly encounter with Di. It is all distracted and crisscrossed with Muo's drifty and dutiful speculating: a sewing machine that busily hums as it hemstitches a dim, vast, and wildly gesticulating tapestry.
As noted at the start, ''Couch" is a picaresque procession. It is a picaresque, though, that lacks the picaro: the specific, material personage that marches from one disparate and extravagant adventure to the next, linking them. Muo doesn't march; his adventures march through him. He floats dimly, he links nothing; it is dreams without a dreamer.
Richard Eder reviews books for several publications. 
