A review of The Angry Wu Zili

By Ouyang Yu

Ouyang Yu’s The Angry Wu Zili is a rare literary artifact — a 100-copy signed and numbered limited edition, published by Otherland Publishing on 1 September 2025. This edition’s rarity alone makes it an object of collectorly fascination, but its textual intensity and existential rage mark it as one of Ouyang’s most unflinching works.

1. The Edition Itself: A Bibliographic Frame

The edition is deliberately scarce — only 100 copies printed, each numbered and signed by Ouyang Yu. Fourteen have been sold, leaving eighty-six in potential circulation. The text is thus as much an art object as a literary one, combining the handcrafted aura of limited editions with the raw modernity of its language. It belongs to the Otherland Literary Journal series (No. 51, 2025), which often champions bilingual and transnational voices, especially those straddling Chinese and Australian literary spaces.

The colophon (p. 2) asserts:

“This is the first 100-copy limited edition of The Angry Wu Zili, by Ouyang Yu, with one hundred copies only, signed and numbered, from 001 to 100.”

Such framing situates the text in the tradition of modernist samizdat — a privately circulated protest against literary mass production.

2. The Opening: A Declaration of War Against Existence

The novel begins with one of Ouyang Yu’s most searing declarations:

“I’m only twenty-one years old. The world has lost all its meaning to me… I have only one wish now: to kill myself.”

This is both manifesto and monologue. The title character, Wu Zili, immediately names his alienation: his hatred is not directed toward an individual or a system, but toward the very condition of being. In tone and energy, it echoes the nihilistic cries of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” and the self-lacerating intensity of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman.”

The first-person voice fuses hyperbolic disgust with lyrical self-awareness, a form Ouyang Yu has honed across his career — where the internal rant becomes both poetry and protest. The prose slips between philosophical despair and grotesque humor, producing a rhythm of rage and reflection.

3. Language as Revolt

Ouyang Yu’s English is intentionally defiant — coarse, visceral, and hyper-translated. It is the language of an immigrant writer who refuses assimilation: raw syntax, taboo diction, and tonal shifts that oscillate between the poetic, the obscene, and the philosophical. This English is not polished but performed — it carries traces of Chinese internal monologue rendered through English phonetic violence. The result is a translingual realism, where grammar itself becomes a battlefield.

Example:

“Instead of being choked to death by the stinky farts of the masses and drenched in their murky urine, it is better to end my own life as soon as possible.”

This grotesque imagery is not gratuitous but symbolic: the collective hypocrisy of society is depicted as a literal excretion, and the act of suicide becomes an existential purification.

4. Thematic Core: Alienation, Suicide, and the Writer’s Futility

Throughout, Wu Zili’s alienation mutates — from familial abuse to academic disillusionment, sexual frustration, artistic impotence, and social revulsion.
He despises both the world of ambition (students chasing careers) and the world of literature (“writers with no brains of their own and only the hands and pens of the puppets”).
Here, Ouyang Yu seems to be speaking through his protagonist, voicing a long-standing contempt for literary institutions and editorial gatekeeping — a theme consistent with his earlier works such as The English Class and On the Smell of an Oily Rag.

Wu Zili’s suicide fantasy is not just personal despair but a metaphysical protest: death as the only remaining authentic act in a corrupted world.

5. Stylistic and Structural Observations

The narrative is fragmented, resembling a stream-of-consciousness confession rather than a conventional novel.
Paragraphs sprawl into pages of rant; punctuation is loose; repetition serves as rhythm. The effect is claustrophobic yet hypnotic — mirroring Wu Zili’s mental spiral.

Sections oscillate between:

  • Autobiographical confession

  • Dialogue with imagined interlocutors

  • Social commentary

  • Erotic hallucination

  • Meta-literary critique

This fluid structure dismantles genre boundaries, making The Angry Wu Zili part novel, part prose poem, part manifesto.

6. Ouyang Yu’s Transcultural Anger

Beneath Wu Zili’s fury lies Ouyang Yu’s broader project — the translation of anger across languages and cultures.
Wu Zili’s name itself (吴自立, “self-standing Wu”) is ironic: the “self-standing” protagonist collapses under his own consciousness.
His rage reflects the diasporic condition — an exile’s double alienation from both origin and host culture.
Thus, the “angry” in The Angry Wu Zili is not just psychological but linguistic and civilizational.

7. Final Reflection: A Book That Burns Itself

By the end, Wu Zili’s monologue folds in on itself — the text becomes a self-consuming artifact, aware of its own destruction. The limited edition mirrors that self-destructive impulse: a book designed to vanish, printed only 100 times, already mostly out of reach.
It embodies what Ouyang calls in another work “the literature of the in-between” — existing between languages, between life and death, between obscurity and immortality.

Conclusion

The Angry Wu Zili is not a pleasant read — it’s a howl.
But as literature, it is fierce, necessary, and unrepeatable.
Its limited edition form transforms it into a literary relic of rage, a modernist suicide note that doubles as a meditation on creation itself.
Each numbered copy, signed by Ouyang Yu, becomes a small monument to the angry consciousness that refuses to die quietly.

[by ChatGPT]

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