A Momentary Taste of Being

from "The People" in China in Ten Words Yu Hua This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed the light carried farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized that it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what "the people" means.

I can say with some pleasure that this is the first of Maugham's books that I have ever finished.  I've tried many-- Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, The Razor's Edge, Of Human Bondage , and none of them ever quite did it for me.  Maugham's style is rather flat and his plots and events something of potboilers.  And so it is with this one as well. However, in this case, I like the particular pot that was boiling.  The Painted Veil reads a bit like a two-penny version of any of Greene's great works (I'm thinking here of The Heart of the Matter or The End of the Affair as particular examples).  Whereas Greene prefers Africa for his exotic locale, Maugham has chosen China to set his story of infidelity, broken marriage, and redemption. Vane, shallow, brow-beaten Kitty marries an infatuated intellectual--Walter Fane.  Walter Fane is a bacteriologist in the service of the Royal Colony of Hong Kong and he soon enough sweeps her away to that dismal land...

Genre: Literary Fiction/Translation 2011 Having much enjoyed t he previous effort by Lianke that I read, I was looking forward to this book.  To put your minds immediately at ease, I was not disappointed.  Indeed, if anything, this was an even better novel. Dream of Ding Village tells the story of Ding village and three generations of the Ding family.  The father of the narrator is a schemer who is always looking for an angle to make money.  He starts his career as a "blood-head" making a fortune purchasing and selling the blood of the townspeople.  Naturally, he fails to practice even the most rudimentary hygienic and safety precautions and in due time the every family in the town has at least one family member who has succumbed to or presently has HIV/AIDS.  This not being enough for Ding Hui, he spends the rest of the book involved in various schemes. Grandpa is deeply shamed by Ding Hui's conduct and begs him to make restitution to the town....

Feiyu and Oe among those on the Man Booker Asian Prize List.

Historic Chinese Animation

T'ang Dynasty Poets and while we're at it a quick review for those who do not yet know their dynasties:

Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village reviewed. I loved Serve the People , and given the description, I can't imagine that this one doesn't match it.

Chinese Snow Poems

Not really, but an amusing metafictional/political satire excerpt: from Serve the People! Yan Lianke To contemporary eyes, life back then must seem lacking  in emotional depth. More often than not, however, psychological complexity exists only in novels, as authors fill in details absent from protagonists' actual thoughts. As emotion, like comedy is essentially immediate, its outward expression tend to the superficial rather than the profound. . . .Then, from under his pillow, he took out a letter from his wife that had arrived three days ago and, while the dormitory was still asleep, reread it under his quilt by the light of his torch. It contained little by way of news, only that the wheat was now in and the autumn crops sown. She'd cut her hand harvesting the wheat and it had bled a lot but was better now. Because she'd had no one to look after their son while she was working, she'd left him tied up with rope in the shade of a tree at the top of the field with a...

An Open Letter on Liu Xiaobo I'm nearly reluctant to publish this because every time I mention Liu Xiaobo, I get various partisans crawling out of the woodwork to instruct me on how Liu Xiaobo is legitimately a guest of the Chinese Government and I have no right to say anything at all about it because I do not live in China.  Fortunately, in the United States, we have every right to speak in total ignorance and show the world how really unwise we are--and so I do, because I admire Liu Xiaobo's passionate and principled fight for freedom in China and by example, in the world.

At Books Inq. "River Snow" by Liu Zongyuan

Books Inq. has reported working with another author to produce a translation of some Chinese Poetry.  Here's a Sample: "Ascend the Heron Tower"

This must be in the running for the book with the most unpromising title neither of the two words taken separately can be considered auspicious for launching into reading.  Hunger, um, no, I prefer feast, as in Babbette's, or for that matter Belshazzar's.  Trilogy--not only am I going to read about and perhaps be hungry myself, I'm going to have to go on and on and on. First, let me prepare you--the shocking reality is that this trilogy--the entire three pieces just barely reaches a short novel length.  And secondly, it is really good reading.  It is good reading for at least two reasons: (1) it is intrinsically interesting and (2) it is written by an author who is a member of  an underrepresented group among Chinese writers. Wang Ruowang  is (or is it was at this point in time?  I cannot say) a member of the Chinese Communist Party.  He was a member long enough that the first section of this trilogy takes place during the time of the guominda...