Not quite like anything I've ever read before, and I'm not sure what to make of it, or whether or not to say I "liked" it. Something like 3 stars for enjoyment, bumped up to four for novelty and for my curiosity about where this is all going. In any case, I'll definitely be continuing to the second volume (of five).The Story of the Stone, more commonly (I think?) known as The Dream of the Red Chamber, is one of the "four great classical novels" of Chinese literature, and often said to be the greatest of the four. Sometime last year I become curious about Chinese literature, about which I knew nothing at all, and figured this would be as good a place to start as any.I feel a bit hesitant about focusing in this review on how unusual this novel is to someone not familiar with Chinese literature. I don't want to overstate its distance from "Western literature" -- which after all is a giant category that includes many disparate and odd things -- or present it merely as some sort of exotic curiosity to be gawked at rather than a work to be judged on its merits like any other. However, having read only a small part of the whole work at this point, I don't really feel qualified to judge it or even say much about its artistic qualities at all. All I have are some preliminary impressions that amount to, "well, that was different." So here we go.The two main things that struck me as "odd" or "different" about this book were the tone and the narrative structure. The tone is a mixture I haven't encountered before. On the one hand, much of the story is lighthearted and whimsical in a way that reminds me of nothing more than Western children's literature. This feeling is bolstered by the fact that the central characters are young adolescents, and that the protagonist, Bao-Yu, is cosmically "special" (being the incarnation of a magic piece of jade) in the way many children's fantasy protagonists are. The young characters are depicted as realistically childish, and there is a great deal of teasing, awkward juvenile flirtation, and the like, none of which would be out of place in, say, one of the earlier Harry Potter books.However, the story as a whole is emphatically not a "children's story" -- there are intermittent bursts of shocking violence, morbid cruelty, explicit sexuality (among the older characters), and so forth. As well, the childish antics take place within a large aristocratic clan and a great number of pages are given over to the day-to-day business, minor power struggles, and the like that take place among the older family members and among the numerous servants.So if I could try to describe the overall "feel" of the book by comparison to Western literature, the closest thing I could come up with is something like "a cross between one of the first few Harry Potter books and some 19th-century chronicle of an aristocratic family, with recurring flashes of gothic horror and metafiction." Though even that isn't really very accurate.As for the structure, it's highly episodic and lacks a "through-line" of narrative tension. Highly tense or dangerous situations arise quite suddenly from time to time, but are typically resolved within the same chapter that introduces them (or, if not, in the following chapter), and tend to make few obvious marks on the story as a whole. Many chapters have nearly no tension and simply recount some episode of minor clan politics (among the adult or servant characters) or juvenile antics (among the child characters). Most of this is pleasant, in a low-key way, but creates little feeling that the story is "going somewhere" or building progressively, which is odd in conjunction with the portentous way it begins (Bao-Yu is incarnated from a magic piece of jade, and one expects his life to be somehow special or unique in consequence).Much as it contains many discrete episodes whose significance to the whole is not always made clear to the reader, the book also contains a very large number of characters (hundreds, I think), and it makes little effort to indicate directly which of these characters are most central or important. As a result, it was quite difficult to get my bearings in the early chapters, as I was confronted with a flurry of names, some of which recurred from chapter to chapter and some of which didn't. (Of course it was harder to keep track of the characters because I'm not used to Chinese names; what's more, many of the characters are related and have the same family names. Thankfully, this edition has an appendix of characters.) After a while, it became clear that certain people were major characters and I began to recognize them as distinct entities, but it took a few hundred pages for me to really feel comfortable, and even after 500 pages I still resigned myself to thinking "who's (s)he? oh well, probably doesn't matter" pretty frequently.The characterization even of the main characters takes place in this distinctive atmosphere, one in which scores of people continually disappear and reappear from view and the reader is expected to cheerfully keep track of it all as though every one were a dear friend. The relationships between Bao-Yu and various other characters, for instance, are rarely "introduced" to the reader in a distinct way, but instead become gradually apparent as one watches him interact with people he has already formed pre-existing ties to. There is a constant feeling of coming into something complicated in medias res and trying to get a sense of it without clear signposts.The back cover of my edition, for instance, informs me that the story centers around a sort of love triangle between Bao-Yu and two other characters, Dai-Yu and Bao-Chai. But this is not introduced to the reader in a set of clear-cut dramatic set-pieces; instead these three characters appear incidentally in various episodes, sometimes individually, sometimes apart, and if their relations to one another are especially important, it is left for the reader to "pick up" on this signal coursing through a much larger sea of (realistically?) profuse details. It wasn't until the last third of this volume, for instance, that I had any sense of Dai-Yu's personality -- Dai-Yu being, like all the other characters, a figure who pops up from time to time rather than a player in some consistent, progressively developed dramatic narrative -- and Bao-Chai is still largely a mystery to me (I hope and expect she will be more thoroughly characterized in later volumes).Much of what I've said may just reflect the fact that I have only read a small part of a larger whole. It's possible, for instance, that the "dramatic through-line" I found lacking simply hasn't developed yet. But it nonetheless seems significant that such a through-line hasn't emerged in 500 pages of incident. All in all, I'm not sure how I feel about this style of storytelling, or about the book as a whole, and am hesitant to say any more until I've read further. But my curiosity is piqued, though I'm not sure how much of that is due to Xueqin's skill and how much of it is due to the simple novelty of such an unfamiliar literary form.(As always with translations, I also wonder what I'm missing by not reading it in the original. David Hawkes' translation is apparently well thought of, and it reads pleasantly and maintains a impish, whimsical tone [which I imagine is consistent with the original?], but it's rarely excellent, as opposed to merely serviceable, by the standards of English prose.)
What can I add more about one of the most incredible novels of all time? This perhaps the greatest Chinese novel, with Jin Ping Mei coming a close second. The verisimilitude throughout the novel is astounding, resembling some sort of "ultra-realism" - for want of a better word - like a painstaking scroll painting of epic scale done more than three centuries ago. :-)For the rest I'll leave Professor David Hawkes to do the talking.----------Dear Professor Liu,Thank you for your kind and courteous letter. I should certainly like to offer you my very best wishes for a successful conference; one in which the participants will find enjoyment as well as instruction, and the organisers feel that their efforts have been worth while.I think all of Hongloumeng's translators must first have come under the novel's spell and later embarked on their translations of it from a desire to communicate some of their enchantment to other people. They may have done so in different ways and with varying degrees of success, but all of them have shared the same generous impulse; and since I am one of their number, I feel inhibited by a sense of fellowship from commenting on the relative merits of their different translations. The saying that "comparisons are odious" may not be a recipe for good criticism, but it holds true, I think, for the translators themselves.Not everyone has come under this novel's spell. I remember Zhao Shuli, at an open-air meeting on the Minzhu guangchang of Old Beida early in 1949, announcing that "we are no longer interested in the antics of spoiled adolescents like Baoyu and the love-life of Tang Ming Huang and his xiao lao po (this was before Houloumeng was commended for showing the "sprouts of capitalism", which the great hongxuejia Yu Pingbo was persecuted for having overlooked); but those who did come under its spell were to be found not only in China but all over the world. The great Swiss-French sinologue Paul Demiéville once told me that he remembered when he was a student in Hanoi, lying on his bed reading Hongloumeng and being so engrossed in the novel that he did not at first notice that his little pet monkey was pissing on him from the top of his mosquito net. Demiéville, who taught himself Russian in order to read War and Peace in the original, thought that Hongloumeng was an even greater novel - greater, certainly, than Proust's epic portrayal of the world of "fin de siècle Parisian snobs".It is such a long time now since I finished with Hongloumeng that I fear I am no longer able to make any useful contribution on the experience of translating it - except to say that I remember the years when I was engaged on the translation as a very happy time in my life. As an extremely slow worker, I was lucky to be able to take as long as I liked and to work with a freedom that some people might think irresponsible, but which I find inspiring. There are errors in my translation, some of them gross ones, and it may in due course, for all I know, be superseded and forgotten, but I am sure such merits as it may have are due in part to the spirit in which it was written - something I could neither analyse nor explain.My favourite English translation, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel by the 17th century Scottish knight Sir Thomas Urquhart, was, I am sure, animated by the same spirit of joyfulness and liberation. I could never hope to equal his achievement - but then I have never been a prisoner, as Urquhart was. So were, come to think of it, two other great translators: Sir Thomas Malory who gave us Mort d'Arthur and, in our own day, Yang Xianyi.I am afraid this is rather a rambling letter.Yours sincerely,David Hawkes(September 9, 2002; written in Oxford)----This is a transcript of Professor Hawkes's letter to a symposium on translating Hongloumeng in 2002. It is published in a collection of essays by the Nankai University Press.
What do You think about The Golden Days (1974)?
Artist: Sun Wen (1814-1904)At the far south-east endPavilions nestled in artificial mountains.On the near north-west sideVerandas brooded on circumjacent waters.Music of little organs playing in the summer-houseIncreased the melancholy in the air.-Poetry, David Hawkes translationThe Dream of the Red Chamber or the Story of the Stone is one of the greatest products of world literature and almost entirely unknown in the West. In its native China, it is an institution. Since its printed publication in 1792, the book has sold in the hundreds of millions of copies. It has spawned at least two TV series, an interpretive dance performance, one black and white film, a computer game and at least six operas (This is only from a glance at Chinese Wikipedia - there's certainly more). What is it? At its center, this is a story of 18th century aristocratic China. A young man, Jia Baoyu, is sent to live with his relatives in the Rongguo palace complex in Beijing. A crux of the story is his relationship with his two female cousins, Lin Daiyu - a melancholic poet, and the prudent and graceful Xue Baochai. But this is only one thread woven into a broader network of families. Four family trees describing most of the main characters.The four families described here make up an entire world. Their lives, their relatives, their chains of influence and command dominate the background of this novel. It is a world which is only partly familiar to us - partly because of the expected ties between parents and children, ties between siblings - but only that much due to the wholly different social customs of the time. This novel fully represents a moment of history. The detail is almost overwhelming. Take the family and their maids. For a family of barely a dozen aristocrats, their domestic staff number in the hundreds. Even some of the maids have their own maids. They attend to every function, from cooking to gardening and even music. Some maids just hold spittoons and others have a higher social status than some family members themselves. That brings us to another topic - the structure of Chinese feudalism and the aristocracy. At first glance, this is a world of wealth and leisure. It is also a world of structure, with defined hierarchies, forms of address, clothing, accepted behaviors, bows, hair pieces, poetry, utensils, tea, gifts, social demands, religious rituals. It is a system which at first appears free from the basic gnawing demands of hunger and labor and daily monotony. But it is a beautiful illusion, a temporary image, almost like the flower petals which Daiyu buries and mourns. The system is top-heavy and nearing economic collapse. One must absolutely not give offense to anyone else above you in the system. Yet within the strict limitations of this system, the characters have their distinct personalities. It's not enough to have dozens of major characters, but also to have their motivations and personalities complex and changing. moral complexity. Take Wang Xifeng, a noblewoman with comparatively little education who has risen to run the household's finances and daily affairs. She is capable of great finesse and diplomacy - yet also terrible spite. (view spoiler)[When she finds out that her husband is cheating on her, we are first inclined to sympathy - until she drives the other woman to suicide. (hide spoiler)]
—Hadrian
I am not sure what to say about this book after reading only one volume. It is an exquisite blend of history, fantasy, magical realism, reality, riddle and of course Chinese philosophical witticisms. There are more than 550 characters in The Story of the Stone and many with very similar names. You must get familiar with at least 50 of these characters because they are not bit players.The plot(s) are intricate but not particularly hard to follow and the pace of reading is quite brisk and easily understandable. That in itself is an accomplishment since the story takes place in China around 250 years ago and revolves around lifestyles and customs that I would imagine that most Westerners are unfamiliar with.I actually read a review where someone compared this book with Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. I don't know about that, but the overview of the book is that it is about the decline and fall of two families.It is a highly enjoyable book.
—William Dearth
I liked this book, but I did not finish it. It's much like reading a dream. The story skips around and presents a series of vignettes that seem connected, but the reader is never completely sure. On one hand it is about a sensitive boy who is really a reincarnation of a stone. Though the stone was once human. he is born into a society of cultivated young women who he enjoys spending time with. He is subject to all sorts of emotional reactions-- flying off the handle, and isn't well accepted by more manly men. Another story is the fate of a kidnapped girl. And another story unfolds the fate of a magistrate. The 18th century Chinese novel has so many characters and so many names... it is difficult to keep track of everyone. Yet, one can dip into the novel and read ten pages and find oneself completely captivated by the vignette. Though following the novel as a whole is challenging without study.
—Sher
