What do You think about Monkey: The Journey To The West (1994)?
I picked this up because I am interested in reading what other cultures consider essential reading - and this is one of the four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. It tells the tale of a priest's 17-year journey to pick up sacred scrolls from Bhudda in India. It also tells of his three disciples, one being Monkey, who is really the main character here. Monkey has great superpowers but also is kind of a dick. He has a bad temper, is super full of himself, and gets into the equivalent of hundreds of drunken bar fights. However, that all comes in handy, because on the way to India, our sacred priest runs into many demons, dragons, evil spirits, animal lords, and 40-foot white turtles. Monkey beats them all up, the scriptures are received, and there you go, Chinese folk lore is born.Most of the book is a pretty repetitive formula - they arrive at a town, some kind of magical evil has taken over the place, Monkey beats someone up thus fixing the problem, and they move on. Some of it is pretty funny however, and kind of surprising given the fact that this was written in the 16th century. At one point, Monkey and his gang break into a temple and eat all the prepared food. When they are discovered, they are mistaken for Gods, and the people beg them to give them sacred Holy Water. Monkey and his buds pee in vases and tell them it's Holy Water, and the people drink it! And all of this described in a very formal, 16th century style. I was cracking up. Toliet humor is so timeless. It was also interesting that the realm of Heaven is exactly like a typical bureaucratic government on Earth. There were offices, titles, paperwork, all operating in a fashion mirroring how we do things down here. All you really needed to visit Heaven was the proper passport. I admit to being a Godless heathen and judging their perception of heaven like it's a work of fiction but c'mon! Have some imagination! Even Scientology has aliens!All in all, I'm glad I read it, but it wasn't the most exciting thing in the world.
—Marc Kozak
One of the "Four Great Classical Novels" of Chinese literature, "Journey to the West" is the 16th-century embellishment of a 7th-century pilgrimage from China to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures that will bring enlightenment to China. At the folklore level, this is a rollicking tale of misadventure and the clever solutions of the trickster Monkey that save the feckless priest Tripitaka and his frequently-unwilling cohorts, the foolish Pigsy and the obedient Sandy. As an allegory, Tripitaka is the everyman kept safe along his journey by genius and enlightenment represented by Monkey. As satire, the inscrutable (to Westerners, anyway!) Chinese character and values and the bureaucracy of heaven and earth are lovingly parodied--many of Monkey's solutions rely on the very connections and bureaucracy that got the pilgrims into the mess in the first place.Arthur Waley chose to translate 30 of the original 100 chapters of Wu Cheng'en's "Journey to the West." Waley's translation is fluid, scholarly, and readable. "Monkey" never feels abridged, perhaps due to the episodic nature of its stories and content. To anyone wishing to learn about Chinese culture, this book is an invaluable insight as well as an entertaining read.
—Carl Nelson
Monkey is a magical tale of fantasy and adventure in the Tang Dynasty (618–907) of imperial China. At around 350 pages, this translation is actually a short version of the 2,000-some-page Journey to the West, which was written in the 16th century. It is a very important book throughout Asia, and considered one of the four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. A Japanese friend of mine assures me that 98% of Asians know the story of Journey to the West whether through the book directly or its numerous spin-offs.Although Monkey is an abridgement, it doesn’t read like one. It really feels like a full story. Most of what was omitted consists of individual adventures along the pilgrims’ journey to India to fetch Buddhist scriptures. Since these mini adventures are largely self-contained, you don’t notice their absence when reading, although the ending does come off as somewhat abrupt.I’ve been wanting to read some Wuxia for a long time due to my personal interest in martial arts. Wuxia is basically Chinese martial fiction, and it is hard to find anything in this genre with less than 2,000 pages. I specifically chose this abridged version because I wanted to get a soft start rather than dive right into a 2,000-page brick only to give up. Though the translation is not perfect, the style is sometimes archaic and the ebook version contains some digital transfer errors, Monkey still fulfilled my expectations. And I expect this won’t be my last wuxia novel. Despite the drawbacks, I'm giving this five starts because I know I'm going to be thinking about this story for a long time.Note:While it definitely helps to first have some basic knowledge of Buddhist philosophy and terms (i.e., the difference between Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Arhats) and the major figures (Guatama/Sakyamuni, Kwan Yin, Amitabha and the Taoist Lao Tzu), you could easily get by without any such prior knowledge and probably learn a good deal about Chinese beliefs simply by reading this book. Interesting trivia: Dragon Ball is based on Journey to the West. The Monkey King is called Sun Wukong in Chinese and Son Goku in Japanese. Hence the name of Goku in Dragon Ball, who is based on the Monkey King.
—Jim Peterson
