Book Review: mr. muo's traveling couch

I liked Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (see my report on this) so much that I read  mr. muo's traveling couch by the same author, Dai Sijie. I was not disappointed.

The inside flap of the book cover gives a better description than I can:

After years of studying Freud in Paris, Mr. Muo returns home to introduce the blessings of psychoanalsis to twenty-first century China. But it is his hidden purpose - to liberate his university sweetheart, now a political prisoner - that leads him to the sadistic local magistrate, Judge Di. The price of the Communist bureaucrat's clemency? A virgin maiden. And so our middle-aged hero, Muo, a Westernized romantic and sexual innocent himself, sets off on his bicycle in search of a suitable girl.

This book is really funny (though I do have to admit I have been accused of having a weird sense of humor). While reading the book, I kept wondering how it would feel to live with such an imaginative brain as this man has.......a thoroughly enjoyable book.

Here is the review in the N.Y. Times..