Decoded: A Novel
*Starred Review* Yan Shi, an aging Chinese code-cracker, views his life labor as “a sort of madness that pulls you close to insanity and to genius.” Readers skate the line separating insanity from genius in Mai Jia’s riveting tale of cryptographic warfare. At the center of Mai Jia’s taut novel, the mathematical genius Rong Jinzhen is spirited away as a young man to China’s secretive Unit 701, an elite cadre of code masters. There Jinzhen encounters the hero who broke WWII Japanese ciphers, now a helpless, chess-playing lunatic. Such is the peril Jinzhen faces as he launches his own lonely assault on PURPLE, the fiendish brainchild of his own former professor. In a narrative challenging readers to do their own decoding of its ruptures and inversions, readers see the brilliant protagonist survive daunting psychological dangers as he unravels PURPLE, inspired by a dream about the Russian chemist Mendeleyev. But when PURPLE’s sinister sibling, BLACK, emerges as the new foe, Jinzhen ventures forth again, veering toward mental breakdown when he loses a research notebook. A denouement at once heartbreaking and thought-provoking leaves readers pondering the collective sanity of a world shrouding knowledge in enigmas. Gifted translators bring English-speaking readers a Chinese literary treasure. --Bryce Christensen