'A novel that is also an anti-novel': A Claude.AI review of The Angry Wu Zili

 

A Descent into the Mind of Wu Zili

There's something profoundly unsettling about reading The Angry Wu Zili. This isn't a novel that guides you gently through a narrative arc. Instead, it pulls you into the churning consciousness of its protagonist—a young man so consumed by alienation and despair that suicide becomes not just a possibility, but a project, a goal to be methodically achieved through the act of writing itself.

Wu Zili tells us from the outset that he intends to kill himself, but not before filling 100,000 to 150,000 blank squares with his existence. The writing becomes both evidence of life and preparation for death—a bizarre contradiction that captures the novel's peculiar energy. He's determined to document everything before disappearing without a trace, leaving behind this manuscript as the only proof he ever existed.

What makes this book so difficult to categorize is its form. Ouyang Yu has created something that resists genre—it's part diary, part philosophical treatise, part plagiarized autobiography, part poetry collection. Wu Zili freely admits to copying from his own past writings, from friends' letters, from a lost notebook he found, from poems left by a defected classmate. The novel becomes a kind of collage of despair, assembled from fragments of multiple lives all circling the same drain.

The voice is relentlessly cynical. Wu Zili sees through everything—love is a transaction, friendship is surveillance, education is indoctrination, society is a prison. He describes his classmates as matchsticks in a matchbox, people as lanterns on bamboo poles, existence itself as meaningless repetition. There's an exhausting quality to his worldview, yet it's leavened by moments of dark humor and surprising tenderness, particularly in his memories of childhood friendships and his relationship with an unnamed ugly woman who becomes his sexual partner.

The university setting feels claustrophobic. Wu Zili lives in a cramped dormitory with seven others, surrounded by people yet utterly alone. He describes the daily rituals—eating in the canteen, taking cold showers, queuing for meals, attending pointless meetings—with a kind of anthropological distance, as if observing alien customs. The banality of student life becomes almost surreal through his alienated gaze.

What struck me most was how the book captures a very specific historical moment—China in the 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution, during the opening up. There are references to political study sessions, class struggle, the restoration of college entrance exams, students going abroad. Wu Zili's despair isn't just personal; it's also a response to having grown up in a society that has violently oscillated between ideological extremes, leaving his generation cynical about all grand narratives.

The sexual content is frank and sometimes disturbing. Wu Zili describes masturbation, wet dreams, unfulfilled desires, and his mechanical encounters with his girlfriend in raw detail. There's no romanticism here—sex is just another bodily function, pursued not for connection but as temporary relief from existential boredom. His attitude toward women veers between idealization and contempt, reflecting his broader inability to connect authentically with anyone.

The inclusion of other people's writing—especially the long section of poems from his defected friend—adds strange dimensions to the text. These poems, ranging from the lyrical to the obscene, offer windows into other troubled minds. Wu Zili copies them out of obligation to a friend's dying wish, but also perhaps because he recognizes kindred spirits in their darkness.

There's a numbing repetitiveness to the book that seems deliberate. Wu Zili circles the same thoughts, describes similar scenes, returns to the same complaints. This could be seen as a flaw, but it also accurately captures the texture of depression—the way the same painful thoughts loop endlessly, the way each day blurs into the next without meaning or progress. The reader experiences his mental imprisonment.

The cold shower scenes recur like a motif. In winter, Wu Zili forces himself to bathe in freezing water, gritting his teeth through the pain. It's one of the few moments where he seems to feel anything intensely—a kind of self-punishment or test of will. These scenes have a visceral quality that contrasts with the numbness that characterizes most of his existence.

What's the book ultimately saying? It's hard to extract a clear message from Wu Zili's nihilism. Perhaps it's a portrait of a generation caught between collapsed old certainties and unformed new ones. Perhaps it's about the impossibility of authentic existence in a society built on hypocrisy. Perhaps it's simply one person's howl of pain, amplified through literature.

Ouyang Yu has created something genuinely experimental here—a novel that's also an anti-novel, that embraces its own formlessness, that makes the reader work through hundreds of pages of one person's mental debris. It's not an easy read. It's often frustrating, sometimes boring, occasionally shocking, and strangely compelling. You finish it feeling like you've spent time inside a damaged mind, and the experience isn't easily forgotten.

Whether Wu Zili actually kills himself, we never learn. The manuscript ends, but his fate remains ambiguous. Perhaps that's the point—the writing was the life, and once the writing stops, the question of physical existence becomes irrelevant. Or perhaps, having exhausted himself through confession, he finds a reason to continue. The book refuses to provide closure, leaving us suspended in Wu Zili's limbo.