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Cargando... Peach Blossom Paradise (New York Review Books Classics) (2004)por Ge Fei
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"A meditation on revolution, idealism, and utopia by one of China's greatest living novelists. In 1898, China experienced one hundred days of utopia, after a cabal of reformist intellectuals persuaded the young emperor to enact sweeping changes intended to modernize the country and bring about the "Great Unity." Their movement ended in blood and the crowning of two more dictators, but not before it whetted an appetite for revolution all across the country - an appetite that would eventually consume millions of lives. One such life belongs to Xiumi, the young daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who goes insane over a painting, then mysteriously disappears. Days later, Xiumi's mother welcomes to the estate a young man who carries a grand but brutal vision in his heart and a gold cicada in his pocket. When his plans collapse, Xiumi inherits his vision, just as she herself begins fighting the Confucian social mores that view women as property. On her wedding day, she becomes a pawn in a series of violent transactions carried out by men who think they are building paradise; as each one fails, she attempts to repay them in kind by spearheading a movement of her own. Her campaign for change is always a fight to win control of her own body; and the cost of even that is nearly total. Ge Fei's prize-winning novel intertwines myths of earthly perfection with a historical tale of revolution and hypocrisy, in which human agency must either be bartered for, or taken by force"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)895.13Literature Literature of other languages Asian (east and south east) languages Chinese Chinese fictionClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (4.06)
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This novel is a retelling of the Peach Blossom Spring myth/fable, but placing the events in the late 19th/early 20th century, around the rebellions and fall of the last Chinese dynasty. I did a fair amount of googling and found a short translation of the myth. I would love to discuss how this is a retelling (I have thoughts but could be totally wrong)--also, how does [book:The Peach Blossom Fan|22748019] fit into this tradition?
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But this book. I loved it. It is the first in a trilogy and I want to read the rest but they are not out in English. This is a family/town saga, a look at revolutionaries and revolutions, a look at women of different classes. It is modern, but the storytelling (or maybe it's the translations?) have echoes of the storytelling in the Chinese classics [book:The Water Margin|552988] and [book:Monkey: The Journey to the West|100237].
Here, though, the main character is a woman. Around 14 when the story begins, Lu Xiumi is the only child of landowners. She has a tutor (she is the only girl in class), her best friend is her household's youngest servant. We meet her neighbors, parents, servants, and other residents of Puji. On the way to her wedding, the caravan in attacked and she is kidnapped by bandits--setting her life on a very different trajectory.
The author also has asides in the story (here presented as footnotes) that imply the characters were real people. They were not--at least per google. But I wonder how many of those asides will come to play in the next 2 novels in the trilogy? (