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Par Une Nuit Où La Lune Ne S'est Pas Levée (2007)

by Dai Sijie(Favorite Author)

2.97 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

2070358569 (ISBN13: 9782070358564)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Gallimard

review 1: There are so many stories in this small book. The story of Pu Yi and his frenzied attack on an ancient manuscript as the Japanese fly him into exile. The story of Paul d'Ampere and his quest to study the ancient language of the scroll even when he is sent to a re-education camp. The story of life in that camp. The story of d'Ampere's son Tumchook, named for the lost language, greengrocer, good son, monk. The story of the power hungry Dowager Empress Cixi and the crimes she committed to retain power. The story of the young French translator narrator who comes to China, falls in and out of love with Tumchook and ultimately discovers the reunited halves of the manuscript in the Forbidden City.Mostly it is a story of language, its importance and its mysteries. I did not love... more this book as much as I love Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch, but there are wonderful descriptive passages and some beautifully evocative writing,
review 2: No, no, no.[return][return]As Ezra Pound said of his early collection "A lume spento": this is a collection of stale cream puffs. "One on a Moonless Night" is contemporary, but Dai Sijie's imagination is embalmed the period between 1890 and 1920: the period of romantic Sinology, of Fennolosa, Binyon, and even Ezra Pound. The period when an aesthete's most obscure and arcane imaginings conjured a rare perfume, a fragrance so refined, so delicate and faded that it could hardly be perceived. The book's aesthetics, in which only the fabulously rare and perfect and long-lost artifact of culture can attract the real connoisseur's eye, comes from symbolist and fin-de-siecle aesthetes like Huysman's Jean Des Esseintes, and book's cast of characters are the stock in trade of 1920s Sinology: Huizong, Du Fu, Li Bo, lost masterpieces of Tang painting, rare sutras, the Jin Ping Mei, oracle-bone script... if those points of reference aren't familiar to you, if they aren't completely tarnished by generations of conservative historians and late-romantic poems, then you may not see just how cloistered, how cobwebbed, Dai Sijie's imagination really is. The book might remind you of "The Name of the Rose," "Foucault's Pendulum," "The Dictionary of the Zhazars," or any number of overly intricate, supposedly erudite novels, all the way down to and including "The Da Vinci Code"... or it might remind you, more precisely, of admirers of Pound's original Sinophilia such as George Steiner. (See Steiner's comment in "After Babel," that Pound translated Chinese poetry better than people who could actually read Chinese, and his notion that the translation issues raised by Pound's versions of Chinese poems might be the most complex event in the history of the universe.) But Eco, Pavic, and the other contemporary writers of the arcane have their own idiosyncracies. This novel is nothing more than warmed-over cobwebs. If you think otherwise, you need to spend time reading about Huizong, Du Fu, Li Bo, lost masterpieces of Tang painting, rare sutras, the Jin Ping Mei, oracle-bone script, and then, when they are as familiar as John Updike's descriptions of New England WASPS, when they have lost whatever aura they might once have had, then come back to this book and you'll see. less

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