Where to start? Volume 2 was as good as it was going to get in terms of consistency, character and plotting. Although Volume 3 often feels like it is falling apart despite the editors’ (Rouge Inkstone, Odd Tablet, translator David Hawkes) best efforts. Still, I continue to rate this five stars and place it on par with earlier volumes. The first reason is for the author’s audacity to introduce a whole slew of new characters midway through the overall story and sidelining major characters such as Xi-feng, Grandmother, Lady Wang, Jia Zheng. The novel, in keeping with its subject, this massive family, cannot help itself from expanding until it breaks. This greatly enhances the reader’s vicarious experience. After Xi-feng’s miscarriage and with all responsible adults away at the Dowager Consort’s funeral, the inhabitants of the Prospect Garden have nothing holding them back from constant bickering (at best), culminating in an all-out throwdown between Aunt Zhao and the former actresses. I love how no one can decide what the actresses should be following the dissolution of the troupe for financial reasons. Are they pets, or are they indentured servants with zero abilities? The situation brings out the worst in everybody, from the cook to Aunt Zhao (and much later, Lady Wang) to Xi-feng who, from her convalescent bed, wants to torture the maids by making them kneel on broken dishes in the hot sun! Although this cluster of chapters is brilliantly humorous in its depiction of a comedy of bad manners, one ultimately senses without being told that the cracks are beginning to show in this small society’s basic structure. However, we still subscribe to the notions of respect for elders, how feudalism works and why it often doesn’t, and how the conflicts among the upper strata of the family are often enacted among their inferiors (particularly anyone in contact with Xi-feng). We remain aware of the severe limitations of women, such as the isolation of the concubine sister (and Bao-yu’s continuing transgressive gender role, as he is the only male allowed to see her face to face). By the end of this volume marriage matches are being made and play out horribly.The second reason that I give this five stars is for the multi-chapter story arcs, involving either fighting while the responsible adults are away, or the saga of Er-jie and San-jie, or the fallout from the naughty embroidery. This expansive quality reminded me of dramatic television when a show decides to throw side characters into the spotlight for an episode. These also make me excited to watch the 1987 CCTV series as soon as I finish volume 5. However, in focusing on new characters I lost the sense of our main characters on the periphery. In previous volumes, a chapter might have very little to do with Bao-yu or Dai-yu, but their relatives and maids play out their relationship by talking about their masters. In previous volumes we were always aware of Aroma and Precious because the popped up in every other scene according to circumstance. The chapters are now less meandering but also less rich in character detail. This makes me fear for volumes 4 & 5, not written by Cao Xueqin himself, though probably from his notes and fragments.Less parties seem to be thrown, the exception being the lavish dinners for Cousin Zhen’s archery parties. I cannot tell whether this is only because of the family’s imposed mourning, or if they really understand they need to stop. Every chapter seems to have the selling of more possessions, whereas in volume 2 every scene involved throwing a party. If anyone embodies this volume’s titular warning voice, it is Tan-chun who says to Xi-feng: “No doubt our time too is coming, slowly but surely. A great household like ours is not destroyed in a day. The beast with a thousand legs is a long time dying.” In order for the destruction to be complete, it has to begin from within. Tan-chun has emerged as one of my favorite characters. Basically I love anyone with any common sense, so I put her up there with Aroma, Bao-chai, Adamantina, and to a lesser extent Patience. Probably my favorite scene (there are so many!) is when Tan-chun stands up to Xi-feng and her marauders Zhou Rui’s wife and Wang Shan-bao’s wife when they search all the young maid’s belongings. However, if the author wants me to love Tan-chun, it probably means something bad will befall her. They do often say that it is a pity she was born to the wrong mother. It is quite sad to see Bao-yu become increasingly lonely as the garden slowly de-populates; “Five more decent people were lost to the world,” he observes after Ying-chun and four maids move to the Sun household. It is a telling remark about how utopian the garden had been just two years ago, coupled with his other observation that unmarried girls are good and married women become horrible or receive horrors. To illustrate his point, his mother sacks several maids and actresses, another preview of future calamities. Although it is quite painful to see certain maids dispatched, it is worth it for the long discussion between Bao-yu and Aroma afterwards. They have such a great chemistry and I don’t believe we’ve had a major scene with them at all in this volume. Bao-chai continues to interest me: she is incredibly respectful of social mores and often is the voice of propriety. Her mind is like a steel trap so she appears to know everything. Yet she often has difficulty when others are emotional, especially when they are rightly so. Bao-chai will tell them they are not being rational, or she will spout off some maxim that she thinks should correct the situation.
Memorable moments from Vol. 3: Grandma Jia gives her speech about how songs aren't realistic because the young girls only have one maid. Xifeng becomes ill and the girls take over. The garden is divided up. 200 pages of mostly maids' stories. The singers are assigned as maids, love affairs, and cross dressing ensues. Baoyu has his birthday party where everyone gets drunk, Zheng dies and the story of Jie Er and Jie San. Interesting to see that it is only after Xifeng's miscarriage that her husband goes off in search of this "2nd wife". Hawkes mentions how the story of jie san seems thrown in from a different story about the monk with the magic mirror and messes up the chronology of the er jie story. Still it was interesting this time to get that the person she was in love with was the straight opera singer who'd beaten up Huan. I think he kinda deserved such misery. It's interesting to see how after this despite her best efforts, Xifeng starts to loose some of her credibility and power within the households. Whether this is due to the new concubines, the death of erjie or the fact that she was ill for so long after her miscarriage is hard to say. Time seems to be going quite quickly in this book, and on page 400 it's already "over a year" since the last meeting of the poetry club. I wish I could find a list of what was supposed to happen when and how old everyone is supposed to be as it can be quite confusing. The last part of the book looks has Grandmother Jia's 80th birthday, and the Moon Festival, Dai Yu and Xiang yun composing poetry was great. I also loved how fiesty Tan Chun got towards the end. And I have to say I really enjoyed Bao-Yu's elegy for "Skybright". Xue pan and his wife were amusing, I realised that xue pan is so the normal leading character of novels, (such as jin ping mei) but here he is gently ridiculed for his behaviour instead. It seemed like things were slowly starting to unravel and everyone was growing up and dying. The families were starting to become seperated and money was becoming more of an issue, and as Xifeng became less powerful the servants gained more freedom to cause trouble. It is a shame that the next 40 chapters were not successfully kept. But will start the next volume of this translation now.
What do You think about The Warning Voice (1981)?
The episodes in this volume revolve around the idea of propriety and violation or transgression of the social order. When the characters face the conflict between fulfilling their desires and upholding Confucian norms, they face punishment. The warning voice, as the added subtitle to the translation indicates, is heard drifting over from the ancestral temple. Punishment for transgressions often takes the form of illness and death. The characters desires paradoxically bind them to the material world and their subsequent punishment prompts their renunciation of that world. Desire in essence forms "the innumerable strands that bind us to the world and it's annoys."
—Laura Stahl
Die warnende StimmeNachdem man bisher 60 Kapitel lang die Geschicke der Jia-Cousins hat verfolgen können, gibt es in diesem Band eine zumindest mir sehr willkommene Abwechslung von den langsam etwas ausgeleierten gegenseitigen Besuchen und Festen: Jia Lians heimliche Affäre mit Er-jie. Interessant sind dabei insbesondere die Anmerkungen des Übersetzers über die Textprobleme, die an dieser Stelle auftreten - das Verschmelzen eines älteren Textfragments in die bestehende Erzählung, was nicht wirklich geglückt ist.Besonders gefallen hat mir in diesem Band aber Kapitel 56; die Beschreibung eines Traums Bao-yus baut auf einem typisch chinesischen Topos auf (der Traum innerhalb eines Traums) und ist sehr gut durchgeführt.Ansonsten fällt auf, wie die in den vorherigen Bänden geschilderte Feierlaune nun oft durch Streitereien innerhalb des Haushalts durchbrochen wird. Der gezeigte Neid, die allgegenwärtige Mißgunst und Vetternwirtschaft bringt erste Sprünge in die bisher so makellose Vase. Immer öfter wird auf die Finanzprobleme der über ihre Verhältnisse lebenden Familie hingewiesen, und man ahnt nun langsam, dass die ganze Geschichte nicht gut enden wird.Aufmachung ist identisch zu den ersten beiden Bänden; sehr hilfreiche und kluge Anhänge, die diesmal auf einige Eigenheiten des Textes bezüglich Nebenpersonen eingehen, und die immer noch unverzichtbaren Stammbäume vervollständigen die gelungene Präsentation.
—Helmut
The Book of Lost Books, right? Read that a few years ago. Chinese literature (and, well, most literature outside of Europe/the Americas/Ancient Greece, Rome, and the near East) was woefully unrepresented. Maybe Steven Moore needs to write the second edition.
—Hadrian
