* Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin
The more things change, the more things stay the same. Why not read a classic? A Chinese classic. I bought this 2-book edition way back when I visited Taiwan many years ago. Then it took me still another few years to actually begin to read it from beginning to end. This epic of a novel is credited to Cao Xueqin, a Qing aristocrat who wrote it in the 18th century and is believed to be largely semi autobiographical with characters and events heavily drawn from his own family's decline. This edition comprises the usual 120 chapters. By some account, the last 40 chapters were written, allegedly by, someone other than Cao. Or some argue they were compiled and edited from lost and found Cao's manuscripts. I will leave the detective work to the Redologists to figure that out. This is an encyclopedia of sort of all things Chinese. You can find nuanced accounts on anything from feast to funeral, occult to opera, and everything in between. Not to mention the rich tapestry of characters, the achingly beautiful, the comically vulgar. the perennial scheming, and the incorrigibly licentious. Despite my shortcoming of the language, history and everything in general, I find the novel not as difficult as I imagined, at least on the surface. The writing, maybe except the poetry, is not too difficult to understand even for someone like myself. The premise of the story is laughably ridiculous and oddly fascinating as once upon a time there is a stone who got left out and left behind from mending the sky. The stone turns to some demigod and saves a withering plant in heaven by watering it. The plant survives, prospers and takes the form of a female body. To return the benevolent act of watering, the plant vows to pay back the stone with all her tears when they reincarnate as humans on earth. And reincarnate they do, and hence the beginning of the story of the stone. It's redundant and utterly under qualified--that's a truism and of itself being redundant, on my part to heap praise on the novel that is considered one of the the four best classics ever written yet it doesn't stop me from saying this: I found the novel emotionally engaging, utterly fascinating and ultimately a joy to read.
* Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee
*World War Z, Max Brooks
* Little Failure: A Memoir, Gary Shteyngart
The more things change, the more things stay the same. Why not read a classic? A Chinese classic. I bought this 2-book edition way back when I visited Taiwan many years ago. Then it took me still another few years to actually begin to read it from beginning to end. This epic of a novel is credited to Cao Xueqin, a Qing aristocrat who wrote it in the 18th century and is believed to be largely semi autobiographical with characters and events heavily drawn from his own family's decline. This edition comprises the usual 120 chapters. By some account, the last 40 chapters were written, allegedly by, someone other than Cao. Or some argue they were compiled and edited from lost and found Cao's manuscripts. I will leave the detective work to the Redologists to figure that out. This is an encyclopedia of sort of all things Chinese. You can find nuanced accounts on anything from feast to funeral, occult to opera, and everything in between. Not to mention the rich tapestry of characters, the achingly beautiful, the comically vulgar. the perennial scheming, and the incorrigibly licentious. Despite my shortcoming of the language, history and everything in general, I find the novel not as difficult as I imagined, at least on the surface. The writing, maybe except the poetry, is not too difficult to understand even for someone like myself. The premise of the story is laughably ridiculous and oddly fascinating as once upon a time there is a stone who got left out and left behind from mending the sky. The stone turns to some demigod and saves a withering plant in heaven by watering it. The plant survives, prospers and takes the form of a female body. To return the benevolent act of watering, the plant vows to pay back the stone with all her tears when they reincarnate as humans on earth. And reincarnate they do, and hence the beginning of the story of the stone. It's redundant and utterly under qualified--that's a truism and of itself being redundant, on my part to heap praise on the novel that is considered one of the the four best classics ever written yet it doesn't stop me from saying this: I found the novel emotionally engaging, utterly fascinating and ultimately a joy to read.
* Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee
*World War Z, Max Brooks
* Little Failure: A Memoir, Gary Shteyngart
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