Which excerpt from "the adventure of the mysterious picture" conveys the playful tone of the passage? the attention of the company was immediately turned to me; if my face had been pale the moment before, it now glowed almost to burning. i tried to laugh, but could only make a grimace; and found all the muscles of my face twitching at sixes and sevens. there is a picture in the room in which i was put last night, that has had an effect upon me the most singular and incomprehensible. “a picture! ” said the old gentleman with the haunted head. “a picture! ” cried the narrator with the waggish nose. “a picture! a picture! ” echoed several voices.

ikk

explanation:

word count 168

serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.