Yan Geling - White Snake and Other Stories
I tend to do fairly poorly with short stories and with literary fiction, so please take my post with a grain of salt, or many!
The main story in this book, "White Snake," is about a ballet dancer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for practicing decadent, Western, and bourgeois art. The others all concern the Cultural Revolution in some way or the other, which may account for another percentage of my reaction. I am rather sick of stories about the Cultural Revolution, thanks to having to watch many movies by Fifth Generation Directors back in high school. They were very good! They were just incredibly depressing, and they were accompanied by horror stories of the Cultural Revolution from my Chinese teachers.
I say this and note that of course, my Chinese teachers were very biased, given that this was in Taiwan, which was where the Nationalists fled to after losing the civil war to the Communists.
I also bounced off the translation. I'm not sure if it's the prose of the translation or the actual Chinese, but I can almost tell how the translation is attempting to stick to the original, and it didn't work for me. It feels like there is a lack of style and stylistic choices. Maybe some day I will attempt to read the original to see how much is the translation and how much is the prose.
All together, it felt too familiar for some reason, and not interesting enough.
The main story in this book, "White Snake," is about a ballet dancer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for practicing decadent, Western, and bourgeois art. The others all concern the Cultural Revolution in some way or the other, which may account for another percentage of my reaction. I am rather sick of stories about the Cultural Revolution, thanks to having to watch many movies by Fifth Generation Directors back in high school. They were very good! They were just incredibly depressing, and they were accompanied by horror stories of the Cultural Revolution from my Chinese teachers.
I say this and note that of course, my Chinese teachers were very biased, given that this was in Taiwan, which was where the Nationalists fled to after losing the civil war to the Communists.
I also bounced off the translation. I'm not sure if it's the prose of the translation or the actual Chinese, but I can almost tell how the translation is attempting to stick to the original, and it didn't work for me. It feels like there is a lack of style and stylistic choices. Maybe some day I will attempt to read the original to see how much is the translation and how much is the prose.
All together, it felt too familiar for some reason, and not interesting enough.