Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine

Kin-Fo is rich, young, and utterly bored. He has everything money can buy, yet feels nothing. When a financial disaster leaves him ruined, he sees an opportunity: death might finally stir some feeling within him. But when he places a pistol to his own head, he discovers he cannot even muster the emotion of fear. Thus begins his extraordinary bargain with the philosopher Wang: hire a man to kill him within six months, and perhaps the anticipation of death will awaken his dormant capacity for feeling. What follows is a comic-philosophical odyssey through the China of 1879, as Kin-Fo pursues Wang across mountains and waterways, sometimes fleeing from him, sometimes chasing after him, all while discovering that life refuses to let him die peacefully. Verne constructs a delightful paradox: a man who cannot die because he cannot feel, and a would-be assassin who keeps finding reasons to postpone the deed. The novel operates on multiple levels: a witty adventure through exotic locales, a sharp satire on Western complacency, and a surprisingly tender meditation on what makes life worth living. Kin-Fo's theatrical suffering conceals a genuine existential hunger that Verne treats with neither condescension nor heavy-handedness.