I'm sorry to say that despite really wanting to like this book I really did not like it. I think there's just too much Harem Intrigue, too many concubines worrying about sex, too much jealousy, and I guess it's just too much of a romantic romance for my taste . ( )

3.5 stars

This is a retelling of a Chinese classic book, but pared down. Chen took out some of the characters and storylines and cut down the text substantially (from, I think, over 1000 pages).

It’s the early 18th century. Daiyu is left an orphan and must travel to live with the rest of her family. Her grandmother never forgave Daiyu’s mother for leaving. Daiyu meets her cousins and it doesn’t take long to fall in love with one of them, Baoyu, but she doesn’t have a hope of becoming betrothed to him, although he has also fallen for her. She becomes good friends with Baochai. In other storylines, there is someone getting out of a murder charge; there are concubines and affairs.

I thought this was good, although it took some time to try to sort out all the characters, with the Chinese names, and I was listening to the audio, so I couldn’t really check back for clarification. So, that took some time. Not that I can really compare it to the original (apparently, the ending was lost), but I thought Chen did a really good job of telling the story that she did. I also like the way she ended it. ( )

A retelling of the Chinese classic 红楼梦 (hong lou meng) or Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. A story I know nothing about, except its name – and fame. But Pauline A Chen’s reimagined version quickly draws me into the lives of the Jia family. More specifically, the women of the Jia family, who live in the beautiful palatial Rongguo Mansion in the Capital.

We join young Daiyu who has recently lost her mother to illness as she leaves her home in Suzhou to stay with the relatives she’s never met before. Her mother was a Jia daughter estranged from her family having married beneath her.

She enters a world so different from the simple life she led in Suzhou. One full of exquisite silks, extravagant dinners, a bevy of servants and politicking among her new relatives and close ties with the imperial court.

There is the ambitious and unappreciated daughter-in-law Xifeng, who manages the household but cannot produce an heir; ; the Lady Jia, powerful and manipulative; plain, unmarried Xue Baochai, a cousin, at first unsure of herself and her place in the family. And quite a number of other relatives and servants.

The heir to all this is Baoyu, clever but unpredictable and quite willful, and supposedly born with a jade in his mouth:

“He is so handsome that all the light in the room seems to shine on him. Low over his brow he wears a gold headband shaped like two dragons playing with a large pearl. He is dressed in a jacket of slate-blue silk with tasseled borders and medallions down the front, over a pair of ivy-colored embroidered trousers. He does not kowtow, but looks at her as if he and she are the only two people in the world.”

And so a little love triangle develops. Baoyu and Daiyu, both with the character for jade ‘yu’ in their names, fall for each other. But Baoyu is betrothed to Baochai, whose wealth and connections make her a better match in the eyes of his family.

The fortunes of the Jia family start out flying high but the death of the Emperor, a coup by a prince (and the family’s vocal support of another prince) result in the men being imprisoned and the women left to fend for themselves, which they barely manage as this is a time when people say things like: “A virtuous woman is an uneducated woman.” Ouch. While the Jia women have some sort of education due to their privileged position in society, they aren’t able to do much with it. Times are hard but they make it through. That little love triangle though, doesn’t quite.

The writing style of The Red Chamberisn’t anything to shout about but the story moves along at a well-clipped pace and its strong female characters pull the reader in.

I doubt that I’ll ever read The Dream of the Red Chamber - it apparently has 400-plus characters and drags its way out to 2,500 pages! – so I can’t tell you how this relates to that. But in my copy of the book, Chen points out that she has “shuffled, truncated, and eliminated both characters and plotlines of the original to create a cohesive and more compact work”.

The Red Chamber is a solid multi-generational drama set in 18th century China, with vibrant historical details (Chen has a PhD in East Asian studies) and a moving plot.

Originally posted at http://olduvaireads.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/the-red-chamber/ ( )

Holy anachronisms, Batman. This hugely entertaining, if not particularly well-written reimagining of Cao Xueqin's 18th century classic, is full of clunky phrases like "Pan had killed someone. Could he actually escape scot-free?" (it must be noted that "scot-free" shows up not once but TWICE. Does Knopf not hire editors or what?) and hilariously unsubtle observations like "She feels oppressed by the weight of being the perfect daughter". At one point, the phrase "adieu" is used in a riddle, and while I don't know anything about Chinese-French relations during the Qing Dynasty (school is wasted on the young) I'm pretty sure that "adieu" was probably not in the lexicon of young Chinese aristocratic women of the time. To be fair, this phrase was taken from David Hawkes' translation and it is needed for a rhyme, but you think SOMEONE would have noticed.

That being said, I'm a sucker for all that exotic Oriental shit (crushed jasmines, mother-of-pearl screens, vests embroidered with gold flowers, etc) which I'm not sure is okay to say because while I'm Chinese, I'm so divorced from that culture that it sounds fetishistic but let's leave it at that. I also love palace intrigue, downstairs/upstairs stories (we get a few subplots involving the servants and maids), and abrupt changes in fortune, all of which this book is happy to supply me with. While the Red Chamber is nominally centered around a love triangle, the real focus is on the complicated friendships and relationships between the women at the Rongguo Mansion. My favorite character was Wang Xifeng, who I imagine as the Cersei Lannister of Beijing, slinging back wine and having steamy affairs (not with her brother though) and generally ruining the illusions of more naive girls. Her sisterwife-like relationship with her body servant, Ping'er, is one of the more interesting aspects of the novel.

Red Chamber reminds me a lot of that other recent reworking of an epic, which was also written by an Ivy League classics student-turned-classics-professor. While Red Chamber's sex scenes are way less sappy than the ones in "Song of Achilles", the novels share that same modern desire of examining the psychology of characters who are touchstones in their respective cultures. They also both suffer from a fairly shallow reading of the original text and a lack of a subtle hand (maybe Chen and Miller could have benefited from studying English lit as well just to see how the competent English-language writers do it. JUST SAYIN.)

Final verdict: I'd definitely recommend this book as pure entertainment. It's so easy to read and just as soapy as anything you'd watch on a Shonda Rimes TV show. I couldn't put it down (which I can't say for any book I've read since middle school). Plus, it might pique your interest in the real thing. I've always wanted to read Hawkes' translation but I was always intimidated by the length and the amount of characters. Maybe this introduction will make it a little easier. ( )

This isn't particularly written well, nor is the story particularly novel. But the characters are well constructed and complicated, and it somehow became a very enjoyable airplane read which I could not put down. ( )