Jan. 15th, 2014 11:42 am
Dans un roman où l'objet n'est pas ouvert
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muckefuckYesterday evening in bed I reached the end of Dai Sijie's Par une nuit où la lune ne s'est pas levée (translated into English by Adriana Hunter as Once on a moonless night). I guess it wasn't a complete waste of my time after all. Still a frustrating read, although it became less so after I started speedreading. If I'd tried to tackle it in French, I'd never've made it more than a hundred pages in.
It seems like the kind of book I should love. Dai rhapsodises on and on about the allure of languages--how each one is a kind of love affair with its seductions, its silly spats, its moments of deep comprehension, and its breakups. But in doing so he also spouts a lot of nonsense. Nothing he says about his invented "Tumchooq" makes much sense and his protagonists' ability to learn it and other challenging tongues is absurdly exaggerated.
The whole narrative is a mixture of hard-edged realism and flights of fancy that never really gelled for me, held together by an uncompelling plot that's composed of banally novelesque coincidences. I know I'm supposed to be swept away by Dai's inventiveness in his extended excursus on historical figures and events, but I wasn't. For that to work, you've got to want the author's additions to be true as much as he does, but I consistently found them less interesting than the actual history, which I would've liked more of.
The novel was most successful when it was grounded in Dai's actual remembrances. There are some lovely (if rather nostalgicised) descriptions of Old Beijing and rural Sichuan. It's least successful when focusing on the female protagonist, who appears to have little identity or existence apart from her obsession with her onetime lover and his obsession with a lost manuscript (neither of which seems like anything to get all that worked up about). I'm glad I wasn't expecting any sort of payoff because I would've been disappointed. My reward for reading to the end was not having to read more of this novel.
But since I apparently never learn from my mistakes, I've now taken up Dai's better-known first novel, Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress in Ina Rilke's translation). Compared to the later work, it's refreshingly straightforward and more clearly autobiographical. It's also significantly shorter, with more dialogue, so if I end up not liking it too much either, at least it won't represent as much time lost.
It seems like the kind of book I should love. Dai rhapsodises on and on about the allure of languages--how each one is a kind of love affair with its seductions, its silly spats, its moments of deep comprehension, and its breakups. But in doing so he also spouts a lot of nonsense. Nothing he says about his invented "Tumchooq" makes much sense and his protagonists' ability to learn it and other challenging tongues is absurdly exaggerated.
The whole narrative is a mixture of hard-edged realism and flights of fancy that never really gelled for me, held together by an uncompelling plot that's composed of banally novelesque coincidences. I know I'm supposed to be swept away by Dai's inventiveness in his extended excursus on historical figures and events, but I wasn't. For that to work, you've got to want the author's additions to be true as much as he does, but I consistently found them less interesting than the actual history, which I would've liked more of.
The novel was most successful when it was grounded in Dai's actual remembrances. There are some lovely (if rather nostalgicised) descriptions of Old Beijing and rural Sichuan. It's least successful when focusing on the female protagonist, who appears to have little identity or existence apart from her obsession with her onetime lover and his obsession with a lost manuscript (neither of which seems like anything to get all that worked up about). I'm glad I wasn't expecting any sort of payoff because I would've been disappointed. My reward for reading to the end was not having to read more of this novel.
But since I apparently never learn from my mistakes, I've now taken up Dai's better-known first novel, Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress in Ina Rilke's translation). Compared to the later work, it's refreshingly straightforward and more clearly autobiographical. It's also significantly shorter, with more dialogue, so if I end up not liking it too much either, at least it won't represent as much time lost.
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