(3).jpg)
| 08-03 | |||||
|
|||||
|
20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth AUTHOR: Xiaolu Guo AVAILABLE: Now
GREAT BOOKS THAT SHAPED CHINA Dream of the Red Chamber
There are other contenders, sure, but it's fair to say that 'Dream' is more preciously guarded than any other book of the illustrious Chinese novels prosaically known as "sì dà míng zhù" or "Four Major Classical Novels." In fact, most will tell you that 'Dream' has no real comparison in all of Western literature. They may be right. At over 2,000 pages, it surpasses Hugo's 'Les Misérables' (Europe's longest novel, not counting Proust's freakishly inescapable 'In Search of Lost Time'), and its characters – 30 major, 400 minor – puts it roughly in the same league as Tolstoy's 'War and Peace.' There, however, comparisons ends. At its heart, 'Dream' is a love story – indeed, a love triangle – but it's also a story about family; the Jia family to be exact, whose fall from grace sets the backdrop of the novel. The book's influence on the Chinese literary scene is hard to overemphasize. Written in vernacular Chinese (not classical Chinese, which was the norm) it pretty much set the standard for everything that followed. 'Dream' is best read in Chinese, of course, but if you have to settle for an English translation then Oxford don David Hawkes' version is highly recommended. In short, this is an ageless masterpiece of the heart and soul. ALSO PUBLISHED The Second Plane
The Six Sacred Stones Thriller written for film buffs
The Rest Is Noise Marvelous tome on music
OK, so at 600+ pages this is not only a long read but will cost a pretty penny, but it's worth every yuan. Full of facts and insights, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross dissects and summarizes 20th century classic music into a wonderfully telescopic vista of the past 100 years. Here you get everything from Mahler to Bernstein in what was not just a time of darkness but also a period stained, as Ross says eloquently, with a "rain of beauty." Part biography, part criticism, part magical mystery tour, it's magnificently hard to put down once opened. |
|||||
|
Tags :
book
|
|||||
| Post | |||||
 |
Xiaolu Guo specializes in plucky heroines. Her first novel in English, last year's 'A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers,' features Z, a gutsy Chinese peasant girl who goes to London and then falls terribly in love with an Englishman. Written in deliberate pidgin-English, the novel became a runaway success, earning 25-year-old Guo a place on the prestigious Orange Prize Shortlist. Her new novel, '20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth', features more girl-power, with attitude in spades. Written when she was just 19, '20 Fragments' was first published in Chinese a decade ago, and in truth has been partly rewritten by Guo for this, its first English translation. It tells the story of 17-year-old Fenfang, an aspiring filmmaker who swaps the potato fields of her remote village for the mean streets of Beijing. Admittedly, not a lot happens in the novel, but Fenfang's cynical Gen-Y musings, and those of her cronies (Fenfang's US boyfriend says China is "better at being American than America"), propels things along nicely and lives up to the book's fractured title. If the novel reads like an autobiography, that's because it is. Guo comes from a remote village, studied film in Beijing, before moving to London, where she now lives. The question is: has she run out of real-life raw material?
Ask any Chinese person what their country's greatest novel is and they'll certainly answer 'Dream of the Red Chamber.'
"If September 11 had to happen," says Martin Amis in his intro to 'The Second Plane', "then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime." Well, we're not sorry either. In fact, we're rather glad the most compelling author of our age has been able to document the most contemptible terrorist incident of our era. This collection of previously published works contains 12 essays and two short stories (including the superlative 'Last Days of Mohammed Atta') from the UK's premier liberal-baiting wordsmith about 9/11 and the world that emerged from it. Expect a "narrative of misery and desperate fascination," as Amis himself puts it. One to read on your holiday, except if you're flying by plane.
Reilly was still at university when he wrote his first novel, "Contest," in 1994. Rejected by every publisher in his native Australia, he decided to self-publish. Some 14 years later, he's a bestseller of nine novels in 20 countries. His stories still read like tepid B-movie scripts, mind, but the 33-year-old "Aussie Michael Crichton" is now cashed up to the eyelids. This, his latest thriller (a sequel to 2005's 'Seven Ancient Wonders') follows hero Jack West Jr. and his bionic arm, trying once again to save the world, er, single-handedly.
