Cao Xueqin (1715–1763)

I found [b:The Crab-Flower Club|981885|The Crab-Flower Club (The Story of the Stone, #2)|Cao Xueqin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1553404177l/981885._SY75_.jpg|49684985] a little slow in comparison with the first volume of [b:The Story of the Stone|139874|The Story of the Stone (The Story of the Stone, #1)|Cao Xueqin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551975644l/139874._SY75_.jpg|17619004]. Volume 3, [b:The Warning show more Voice|1404411|The Warning Voice (The Story of the Stone, #3)|Cao Xueqin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1552246511l/1404411._SY75_.jpg|49685095], is more eventful and compelling. The profusion of domestic incidents allow Cao Xueqin to demonstrate his wonderfully keen eye for personalities and how they clash. There is something curiously timeless about a household struggling to get along as their financial situation deteriorates. The Jia family's expenses exceed their income and this is starting to cause problems. Several younger female characters step up to household management roles and attempt cost-saving measures. However these are always contested and difficult to impose, as no-one wants to sacrifice their comforts or spheres of influence. The complex web of relationships between the extended family and their servants is fascinating to observe. Bao-yu doesn't have a particularly strong presence in this volume, which largely follows the women who run the household both on the senior management and shop floor levels, as it were. Throughout the novel so far the narrative has been equally interested in the aristocratic Jia family and their servants.

There are fewer big celebrations in [b:The Warning Voice|1404411|The Warning Voice (The Story of the Stone, #3)|Cao Xueqin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1552246511l/1404411._SY75_.jpg|49685095] than [b:The Crab-Flower Club|981885|The Crab-Flower Club (The Story of the Stone, #2)|Cao Xueqin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1553404177l/981885._SY75_.jpg|49684985], firstly because of a family bereavement that puts everyone in mourning for a long period and secondly due to money. The family resort repeatedly to pawning treasures in order to pay for parties, which is clearly not sustainable. The servants are the ones who actually do the pawning, so are keenly aware of what's going on. Amid these financial problems and the domestic turbulence they cause, one plot thread really stands out. Xi-feng, a woman whose strength of character you have to admire while also being terrified of her, discovers that her husband has secretly married a second wife when he should have been in mourning. Her actions upon discovering this are impressively machiavellian, albeit merciless towards the unfortunate second wife. Events proceed in a positively operatic fashion, culminating in a tragic denouement.

Indeed, all the marriages that happen in this volume turn out very badly. I don't think I've spotted a good husband yet in [b:The Story of the Stone|139874|The Story of the Stone (The Story of the Stone, #1)|Cao Xueqin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551975644l/139874._SY75_.jpg|17619004]. They are all feckless gamblers, cruel abusers, paranoid obsessives, or some combination of the three. Bao-yu is accused of being effeminate and spending all his time with maids, but his options for male companionship are pretty terrible. By contrast, his female cousins and maids are witty, intelligent, and artistic.

There is an ominous sense of things starting to go downhill for the Jia family at this halfway point of this five volume novel. While the second volume is full of voluptuous material luxury and sumptuous parties, here tragedy, instability, and the need to control expenditure creep in. Now that I'm pretty familiar with the huge cast of characters, I find [b:The Story of the Stone|139874|The Story of the Stone (The Story of the Stone, #1)|Cao Xueqin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551975644l/139874._SY75_.jpg|17619004] highly readable as well as fascinating. It is an extraordinarily intricate family drama, set in a historical milieu evoked in exquisitely vivid detail. I do not wonder at it remaining a classic for centuries. Finally, the translator must be commended both for the fluid style and reconciliation of the contradictions between multiple surviving manuscripts, a process carefully described in the appendices. show less

Back on form after the longeurs and endless poetry of vol. II, here is where the cracks really start to show in the social and financial structures of the Rong/Ning clan. We also get one or two magical-realist incursions, unseen since vol. I, in the form of ghostly and monkish visitations. With Xi-feng spending most of the volume recovering from a miscarriage, and the other adults away for an extended period attending to funerary rites, things in the garden go haywire as servant-intrigues show more proliferate, the actresses are unleashed, and the gilded youth grow inevitably apart as adulthood looms. Bao-yu cuts a very pathetic figure, left behind by all this change, who "should have been born a girl" and, despite losing his virginity to Aroma very early in the book, seems both unable and unwilling to leave childhood behind or face the "interesting times" on the horizon. Tan-chun emerges as an old head on young shoulders, taking on some of Xi-feng's last-ditch financial dyke-plugging duties while gloomily noting that "the beast with a thousand legs is a long time dying."

Some wonderful subplots including Jia Lian's second marriage and Xi-feng's thwarting of it, the violent romance involving the You sisters, the mystery of the pornographic trinket, and Xue Pan's unfortunate marriage. I also loved the archery debauches across the street and the moon-viewing party with its distant flute and eerie aftermath in which Dai-yu (who's surely not long now for this world) and Bao-yu wander the garden in the dead of night. And, despite my above dig at the surfeit of versifying, Bao-yu's elegy for poor Skybright really is the culmination of David Hawkes's amazing work with the poetic aspects of the book — so rich and complex in its imagery and deeply moving. Kudos also to the crazy poem featuring 30+ rhymes for "gate" which somehow holds its head high while employing words like "pernoctate". I'm sad that I have to part ways with Hawkes for the last two vols, tr. Minford. The image of Xue Pan's unpleasant wife gnawing the bones of fowls, "crisp-fried in boiling fat", is a suitably ominous one on which to end... show less

600 pages of pampered teens planning to write poetry and drink tea, and then writing poetry and drinking tea, punctuated by savage beatings and suicides which are instantaneously effaced by more poetry and tea drinking. It's like one of those nineties indie bands that were quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet LOUD quiet quiet quiet LOUD... but with a greater ratio of quiet to loud.

Xi-Feng continues to bring the spice to this otherwise fairly insipid hotpot, orchestrating pranks on good old Grannie show more Liu (who is a terrific sport) and getting violently shitfaced at her own birthday party. Behind the scenes she's busy keeping an increasingly precarious number of pecuniary plates spinning as the family's fortunes, imperceptibly to most, decline apace. The canary in the coalmine, as so often, is a memo from Accounting...

I'm still enjoying this even if my eyes glaze over at yet another description of a knick-knack or character's attire, or the arrival of yet another sub-clan of country cousins. I'm still in the dark about the identity of the vast majority of the characters, but it doesn't seem to matter. There's a hypnotic rhythm to this volume that makes it perfect for one-chapter-per-night reading. show less

Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, opens by addressing the reader’s inferred question about the purpose of the book, and moves on to a creation myth with a magical stone that takes on human form. Later, the central character, Bao-yu, is born with a piece of jade in his mouth, carved with a verse:
“Mislay me not, forget me not,
And hale old age will be your lot.”
On the back, it promises to dispel witchcraft, cure melancholy, and tell fortunes.

Volume I is set show more in a mansion in the mid 1700s, when Bao-yu is aged around 12. He is grandmother Jia’s favourite, and loves beauty: poetry, but also lavish clothes, jewellery, make-up, perfume, and all things feminine, though concern is about him becoming a libertine, rather than not being masculine enough.

Image: Bao-yu’s maid, Skybright, aka Qing-wen, painted by Xu Baozhuan (Source)

It’s a rich and curious mix of fable, fairytale, fate, religion, social commentary, family drama, duty, dreams, etiquette, aromas (and Aroma), lust and love, poetry, and garden design. There’s a long section featuring fairies, which turns out to be a dream. Some parts are like a Shakespeare comedy (not that I’m suggesting one inspired the other). Poems, couplets, and riddles pepper the text, along with more distracting lists of genealogies, gifts, and nearly 30 mourners. It spans grand events and domestic details.

There are fascinating and beautiful sections (the garden, and a long dream, in particular) but there are many domestic comings and goings, some of which are rather dull, though occasionally, Cao explicitly omits them:
“Nothing particularly worth recording took place.”

It can be hard to keep track of the vast cast of characters, and their ages and genders, because of their similar names and complex connections (Emperor, concubines, eunuchs, civil servants, aristocrats, merchants, kidnappers, slaves, staff), relationships (by blood, love, friendship, adoption, and marriage), and the things they get up to (drinking and sex).

At first, I massively underestimated both the scale of the Rong Mansion (over 300 inhabitants) and the garden (a replica in Beijing is 13 hectares, with more than 40 scenic spots).

Image: Painting of Grand Prospect garden, aka Daguanyuan, featuring lake, bridge, and boat, by Sun Wen (Source)

All-scents Garden

The beautifully-named garden could just as easily be the All-sense Garden. When Yuan-chun, who is Bao-yu’s sister and now one of the Emperor’s concubines, is allowed to visit for the first time in many years, the family have to build a “Separate Residence for the Visitation”, which takes 10 months and has to be approved for suitability and security by a team from the Palace, who also instruct the family on protocol.

It’s built next to the All-scents Garden and contains many residences amid hills, a large lake, rocks, animals, plants, and ornaments, all carefully positioned to gradually reveal new vistas as one walks through.
“The fallen blossoms seemed to be even more numerous and the waters on whose surface they floated even more limpid than they had been on the [other] side… The weeping willows which lined both banks were here and there diversified with peach and apricot trees whose interlacing branches made little worlds of stillness and serenity beneath them.”

Every element needs an auspicious name and poetic inscriptions, prompting much debate.

For the day of the visitation, the family purchase two dozen “little nuns”, as well as dancers, food, fireworks, lanterns, and incense.
“Together they combined to make a fairyland of jewelled light.”
Yuan-chun renames it the Prospect Garden, and changes some of the other names and inscriptions, before tasking the girls and Bao-yu with composing verses.

Afterwards, she suggests the girls and Bao-yu (all cousins) live in the garden, with their maids and pages. It’s like a cross between Eden and a college dorm! Bao-yu loves it at first, but grows discontented because the girls:
“were mostly still in that age of innocence when freedom from inhibition is the fruit of ignorance.”
His page, Tealeaf, supplies him with raunchy novels, which help.

Image: Painting of a wistful woman in Grand Prospect garden, aka Daguanyuan, by Sun Wen (Source)

A world away

I’ve travelled in China a few times, and read some Chinese fiction, but such a geographically and historically huge culture still holds surprises:

• Like Don Quixote, this has postmodern aspects of metafiction and stories within stories, as well as frequently addressing the reader directly: most chapters end on a cliff-hanger, telling the reader why they should read the next one.

• The attitudes to sex are remarkably relaxed: the cook’s wife is known as “the Mattress” because almost all the men (family and staff) have slept with her and she has “pneumatic charms and omnivorous promiscuity”. Youngsters have sex, or close to it, often after wine, with each other, across class boundaries. But the Emperor’s concubine can talk to her father only through a paper screen.

• I found it odd that many of the fairies, maids, and nuns had Latinate names (Disenchantment, Citronella, Sapientia). The translator’s choice, but names of rooms and places were more poetic and less Latin (blossom and flowers).

Authorship

This is epic in scope but doesn’t hang together as a single story, or even series of stories. It’s like a composite in different genres, by different authors, some with more of a narrative than others. This makes sense. The author died in 1763 and this was first published nearly 30 years later. It was incomplete, there is no definitive version, and the wordplay, hidden jokes, and 16th century symbolism (old-fashioned at the time Cao wrote it), make it tricky to translate.

Nevertheless, it’s a classic of Chinese literature. Cao is sometimes called “the Chinese Proust” (my Proust review HERE), though for me, Miguel Cervantes seems closer (my Don Quixote review HERE), given the humour and dreams.

Penguin published it in three volumes, each over 500 pages, plus introductions, appendices, character lists, and family trees. This is a review of the first.

Image: Painting of one of the grand receptions by Sun Wen (Source)

Quotes

• “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.”

• “Cheeks as white and firm as a fresh lychee and a nose as white and shiny as soap made from goose-fat.”

• “Initiate him in the pleasures of the flesh… to shock the silliness out of him.”

• “The leaves are picked in the Paradise of the Full-blown Flower on the Mountain of Spring Awakening… It is infused in water collected from the dew that lies on fairy flowers and leaves. The name is ‘Maiden’s Tears’.”

• “Two women came in bearing… bowls and dishes containing all kinds of meat and fish, only one or two of which appeared to have been touched.” [the uninvited guest is from a lower branch of the clan]

• “The plays… seemed to involve much rushing in and out of supernatural beings, and the sound of drums and cymbals and blood-curdling battle-cries, as they whirled into combat.”

See also

• An equally lyrical, but easier, novel involving the philosophy of garden design and object placement (Japanese design, but much in common with Chinese), is Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists, which I reviewed HERE.

• A very different sort of red chamber is a traumatic feature of Jane Eyre’s childhood. See my review HERE. show less