Dai Sijie’s 5000 mètres avant l’aube

Dai Sijie’s novel (really a novella at under 200 pages) “5000 mètres avant l’aube”(Gallimard, 2026) is out in France, but I don’t know if/when there will be an English edition but it sounds like an interesting read….

1944. In the jungle on the Sino-Burmese border, the Japanese army has built a POW camp on the site of a former Jesuit mission. Commandant Matsui, who runs the camp, rules with an iron fist — some buildings are reserved for biological weapons experiments on Chinese orphans.

A French pilot of Eurasian descent, Jean Sautet, is taken prisoner. Matsui is stunned – a former runner on the national team, he was beaten by Sautet at the 1924 Paris Olympics. He devises an outlandish plan – to rebuild the Parisian Olympic stadium in the jungle and rerun the race.