What do readers think of The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu? Write your own review.

The Funeral Cryer is about a subject that I had never heard of—professional funeral mourners. According to Wikipedia, this is an occupation for mostly women that has been around in China since 756. As described in this book, the unnamed and main character is paid to dress in specific clothing, come to funerals of people she doesn't know and perform as a mourner.

I initially anticipated that this would be a historical novel, but the story takes place in a small town in rural China sometime recently (the characters have cell phones, although reception is sketchy). The narrator is a middle-aged woman, stuck in an unhappy marriage with an unemployed husband and a daughter who fled the village and rarely visits. All the characters are unnamed in the book, and are referred to as the butcher, the daughter, the husband, etc. Nothing much happens and no problems are resolved.

Unfortunately, there is no dimensionality in any of the characters. They all seemed flat, like paper cutouts that drift through life, asking questions without expecting or working toward any answers. The narrator often maintains a monologue that is nothing but questions, which is difficult to read. Halfway through the book I realized that I really didn't care what happened to any of characters (this is the point where I would normally give up on a book, but I kept reading to finish for this review). By the end, I had a question of my own: what was the point of this book? I did not come up with an answer.

I cannot in good faith recommend this book.

I gave this book 1 star, as I am amazed the author was able to get this published. The other star is because I was able to finish the book.

The writing is simplistic and stilted. I found it to be a very slow read but I kept thinking the story was going to become more meaningful. It didn’t.

It was difficult to develop any feeling for the characters as they were poorly developed and the story line just was not that interesting to me.

A funeral cryer is an old-world cultural tradition in China. The cryer sings and stirs up emotional responses at funerals. While a disappearing tradition in modern China, the main character in this story continues this practice in her small village. Given limited employment options, and while shunned by some for the practice, it is the main source of income for her family. The descriptions of village life, the patriarchal village and family life, even when most employment/income is provided by the women in the household, was fascinating to a point. The story highlighted the lack of employment opportunities and limited resources for those without a university education or for those not living in the larger cities. The writing style was abrupt, short sentences, representing a colloquial style of speaking. The story of a funeral cryer, her do nothing but play mah-jongg husband, and his affairs, became repetitive after a while. Once I got past descriptions of life in this small town, I lost interest in the story. And the writing style did not present a fluid reading experience.

I'm not sure what the author intended with this book that did not name any of the main characters other than their role in the story (Daughter, Husband, Barber, etc.) but keeping the characters at such a remove was a fail for me. I found it impossible to care about characters that the author did not bother to name or imbue with personality. I did manage to finish the book but the ending felt like the author was just as tired of the story as I was. The book ended abruptly without any sort of growth or resolution for the Funeral Cryer. Overall, a very dissatisfying read.

I was eager to read this book and find out more about the profession of being a funeral cryer in the Asian culture, but this book was disappointing. I found the writing style to be very dry and the characters one dimensional and nothing that I found I could relate to. The “plot twist” at the end came out of nowhere and didn’t make any sense to me and then the story just ended. This one just wasn’t for me!

I was really looking forward to reading this book. I know nothing about the profession of Funeral Cryer and I was hoping to learn more. I was so disappointed. The entire book is the funeral cryer (the reader never learns her name) musing and whining about her job, her life, her horrid husband and his possible affair and her fantasies about another man over and over. The dialogue is stiff and unnatural and the writing is jarring. I enjoyed reading about when she would perform at a funeral but those passages were few and far between. I wanted to root for the funeral cryer because her life seemed so dismal but I couldn’t find the energy. I really would not recommend this book to anyone.

With stilted, almost awkward writing, a thin plot, and one-dimensional characters, this dark and sorrowful book by Wenyan Lu is a disappointment because it has the potential to be so much more.

Taking place in modern-day China but in a remote, rural village that hangs on to the old customs, this is the story of a middle-aged woman who is never named. None of the characters is named except for a few who are given nicknames. The woman is married to a man she refers to as "the husband," and they have one grown daughter, who lives in Shanghai. It is a loveless marriage, bordering on abusive. The husband is unemployed. She works as a funeral cryer. It is her job to lead the mourners in crying. Meanwhile, she suspects her husband, who spends his time playing mahjong, of having an affair with a woman named Hotpot, while she herself is making eyes at the local barber. Because of her job as a funeral cryer, she is thought to bring bad luck and to smell of the dead. She experiences discrimination from others' superstitions about death—so much so that she is refused admittance to her father's nursing home and is ostracized by those in the village.

The underlying theme of the book is death and dying—our fears, anxieties, and trepidations. Being surrounded by death weighs on the woman, and eventually she decides to live a better life. Even though the novel was leading up to this all along, her change of heart is quite sudden, so it feels forced and implausible.

The writing style is characterized by short, jarring sentences and abrupt paragraph changes, while the dialogue is stilted and boring and often doesn't serve to move the story forward, focusing on the mundane aspects of life.