My Account | RSS
| ||
|
||
Once on a Moonless Light
by Dai Sijie
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
Dai Sijie, a Chinese author writing in French, is best known for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which was (by the standards of Asian fiction in the West) a commercial and critical blockbuster, yet he has become more interesting with each of his subsequent, albeit less-well-known, novels. Balzac was, in spite of its setting in the Chinese countryside during the Cultural Revolution, a relatively traditional coming-of-age story. It was, as the French might say, sympatique.
In his second novel, Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch, Dai ventured into the absurd and magic realism, both well-established in contemporary Chinese fiction, sacrificing perhaps the straightforward storytelling of Balzac while gaining much in sophistication.
In Once on a Moonless Light, Dai returns to storytelling while retaining much of the experimentation that made Muo so interesting.
Once on a Moonless Light is the story of a search for a lost ancient scroll, tossed out of an airplane by Pu Yi on his way to become the puppet emperor of Manchukuo. He tore it in half: one half was collected by a disgraced Manchu aristocrat, passed down through the family to his Sino-French grandson Tumchooq who, due to vagaries of Chinese politics, is a greengrocer. A young French exchange student, who translates for Bertlucci who is in Beijing for the The Last Emperor, falls in love with Tumchooq. The silk scroll, and the search for the other half, both binds and separates them in a story filled with twists and turn of fate, back stories, symbolism and intersections of politics and religion worthy of a Dan Brown novel.
If it stopped there, Once on a Moonless Light would be a pleasant and intriguing read, a Sino-French take on the thriller novel set in exotic Asia.
But Dai adds layer upon layer of meaning. The scroll isn't written in Chinese, as one might expect, but in a now dead language called Tumchooq, the same as the young man, who is the product of the daughter of a Manchu aristocrat banished from the Forbidden City by the Empress Dowager Cixi, and a French historian cum linguist who took Chinese citizenship only to be incarcerated for thought crimes. There is much to being Chinese, it seems, that involves not being Chinese.
Dai tells the story from multiple points of view, using Victorian-length monologues, diaries, notebooks, historiography and travelogue: no simple narrative this.
The story -- the mystery of the scroll, the tribulations of Tumchooq as he comes to terms with his genetic, intellectual and cultural heritage, and the love of the student and greengrocer, a conjunction as intellectual as it is physical -- pulls the reader along, as does the language which is pungent and immediate. And as for the scroll itself: this is one mystery, one message, that really makes it worth reading until the last lines of a novel to discover.
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
by Dai Sijie
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
Dai Sijie, a Chinese author writing in French, is best known for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which was (by the standards of Asian fiction in the West) a commercial and critical blockbuster, yet he has become more interesting with each of his subsequent, albeit less-well-known, novels. Balzac was, in spite of its setting in the Chinese countryside during the Cultural Revolution, a relatively traditional coming-of-age story. It was, as the French might say, sympatique.
In his second novel, Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch, Dai ventured into the absurd and magic realism, both well-established in contemporary Chinese fiction, sacrificing perhaps the straightforward storytelling of Balzac while gaining much in sophistication.
In Once on a Moonless Light, Dai returns to storytelling while retaining much of the experimentation that made Muo so interesting.
Once on a Moonless Light is the story of a search for a lost ancient scroll, tossed out of an airplane by Pu Yi on his way to become the puppet emperor of Manchukuo. He tore it in half: one half was collected by a disgraced Manchu aristocrat, passed down through the family to his Sino-French grandson Tumchooq who, due to vagaries of Chinese politics, is a greengrocer. A young French exchange student, who translates for Bertlucci who is in Beijing for the The Last Emperor, falls in love with Tumchooq. The silk scroll, and the search for the other half, both binds and separates them in a story filled with twists and turn of fate, back stories, symbolism and intersections of politics and religion worthy of a Dan Brown novel.
If it stopped there, Once on a Moonless Light would be a pleasant and intriguing read, a Sino-French take on the thriller novel set in exotic Asia.
But Dai adds layer upon layer of meaning. The scroll isn't written in Chinese, as one might expect, but in a now dead language called Tumchooq, the same as the young man, who is the product of the daughter of a Manchu aristocrat banished from the Forbidden City by the Empress Dowager Cixi, and a French historian cum linguist who took Chinese citizenship only to be incarcerated for thought crimes. There is much to being Chinese, it seems, that involves not being Chinese.
Dai tells the story from multiple points of view, using Victorian-length monologues, diaries, notebooks, historiography and travelogue: no simple narrative this.
The story -- the mystery of the scroll, the tribulations of Tumchooq as he comes to terms with his genetic, intellectual and cultural heritage, and the love of the student and greengrocer, a conjunction as intellectual as it is physical -- pulls the reader along, as does the language which is pungent and immediate. And as for the scroll itself: this is one mystery, one message, that really makes it worth reading until the last lines of a novel to discover.
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
Available in Asia from Paddyfield.com
|
