Help! My wish list #15
One more title from my ever-expanding reading wish list.
** The cover image is for illustrative purposes only. If you are a publisher and would kindly like to offer me a copy of this book for review, I will change the cover so as to reflect the edition received. **
Once on a Moonless Night
By Dai Sijie
Amazon's product description: Beguiling and ambitious, this new novel by the author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is ostensibly a search for an ancient text and a love story. But beneath that is a haunting tale about language and identity, about the shifting layers of history under the confusing surface of Chinese life and politics, with a final Buddhist twist. A young French woman in Peking in the late 1970s interprets between Chinese professors and Bertolucci for his film The Last Emperor. Afterwards, she follows a disgruntled old professor who tells her about a text believed to be taken directly from Buddha’s teachings and inscribed on silk cloth centuries ago. It was written in a now-dead language called Tumchooq (coincidentally, the name of a young Chinese man she has just met), so beautiful in its simplicity it is almost impossible to render accurately in translation. Puyi, the last emperor and last owner of this relic, allegedly tore the silk in two with his teeth while being flown to Manchuria by the Japanese, and threw the fragments from the plane. Only half of the mutilated manuscript was recovered and the reader, like the narrator, must wait till the end of the novel to discover the rest. When the complete text is finally pieced together, its message is devastatingly simple, and all the more poignant because it has taken such sacrifice and effort to decipher. Comprising ancient texts and fables, stories within stories, and a young man’s desperate search for his father’s legacy, this brilliant novel, covering almost a century of China's history, has the modernity and tenderness of the film, Lost in Translation.
Why I want to read this book: I haven't read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress but I've seen the film based on it and loved it. It convinced me that Dai Sijie must be a great storyteller! Besides, this novel seems to be about everything that I love: languages, translations, lost manuscripts and love!
** The cover image is for illustrative purposes only. If you are a publisher and would kindly like to offer me a copy of this book for review, I will change the cover so as to reflect the edition received. **
Once on a Moonless NightBy Dai Sijie
Amazon's product description: Beguiling and ambitious, this new novel by the author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is ostensibly a search for an ancient text and a love story. But beneath that is a haunting tale about language and identity, about the shifting layers of history under the confusing surface of Chinese life and politics, with a final Buddhist twist. A young French woman in Peking in the late 1970s interprets between Chinese professors and Bertolucci for his film The Last Emperor. Afterwards, she follows a disgruntled old professor who tells her about a text believed to be taken directly from Buddha’s teachings and inscribed on silk cloth centuries ago. It was written in a now-dead language called Tumchooq (coincidentally, the name of a young Chinese man she has just met), so beautiful in its simplicity it is almost impossible to render accurately in translation. Puyi, the last emperor and last owner of this relic, allegedly tore the silk in two with his teeth while being flown to Manchuria by the Japanese, and threw the fragments from the plane. Only half of the mutilated manuscript was recovered and the reader, like the narrator, must wait till the end of the novel to discover the rest. When the complete text is finally pieced together, its message is devastatingly simple, and all the more poignant because it has taken such sacrifice and effort to decipher. Comprising ancient texts and fables, stories within stories, and a young man’s desperate search for his father’s legacy, this brilliant novel, covering almost a century of China's history, has the modernity and tenderness of the film, Lost in Translation.
Why I want to read this book: I haven't read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress but I've seen the film based on it and loved it. It convinced me that Dai Sijie must be a great storyteller! Besides, this novel seems to be about everything that I love: languages, translations, lost manuscripts and love!
You may like to check out "People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks. Our book club read it last year and it was absolutely fantastic. It has many threads running through it of people through the centuries who've had a certain famous Jewish haggadah in their possession. It tells the story of how this manuscript has survived all the hundreds of years of Jewish persecution. If you love languages, translations, lost manuscripts and love then this one would be right on the button :-)
ReplyDeleteMegan.
Thanks, Megan! A friend gave me that book for my birthday and I loved it. Absolutely loved it! I was actually looking at it a few days ago and considering a re-read! If you can think of other similar books... I'm all ears!
ReplyDelete