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Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Penguin Classics (1982), Paperback, 608 pages
Description
"The Story of the Stone" (c. 1760), also known as "The Dream of the Red Chamber", is one of the greatest novels of Chinese literature. The fifth part of Cao Xueqin's magnificent saga, "The Dreamer Awakes", was carefully edited and completed by Gao E some decades later. It continues the story of the changing fortunes of the Jia dynasty, focussing on Bao-yu, now married to Bao-chai, after the tragic death of his beloved Dai-yu. Against such worldly elements as death, financial ruin, marriage, decadence and corruption, his karmic journey unfolds. Like a sleepwalker through life, Bao-yu is finally awakened by a vision, which reveals to him that life itself is merely a dream, 'as moonlight mirrored in the water'.
User reviews
LibraryThing member mattviews
The second installment of The Dream of the Red Chamber is saliently deprived of all the supernatural phenomena, celestial illusions and fairy appearances that were mandatory to account for the general background of the novel. This volume begins with the whimsical resolution of a life-threatening
The narrative of Volume 2 is firmly grounded in the Jia's domestic life and the world's affairs. An affluence of prose devotes to the cousins' founding of the poetry club in the Prospect Garden, The Crab-Flower Club. The story now becomes entwined with the conceiving, writing and critique of poems. Although this volume is deprived of the excitement of magic, it holds significant value in Chinese literature. The text proliferates with passages containing references to books, plays, and poetry that to most readers, lacking the literary background that Cao Xueqin was able to take for granted in his Chinese contemporaries that are quite difficult to read. The characters made frequent allusions to the Four Books, Five Classics, and Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty, literature that were among the syllabi for civil service examination and reading lists of well-nurtured youngsters. Lin Daiyu composed lines that demonstrated a form of poetry that became perfected in the 18th century known as regulated verse. Regulated verse exploits the characteristic tonality of the Chinese language, using an extremely rigid formal structure in which tension is created by combining tonal contrast with verbal parallelism.
Daiyu's verses reveal effort of deep thought and grief in her morbidly austere relationship with Baoyu. As banal as the domestic life this volume so tediously portrays, an important fact one can conceive out of the family's daily hurly-burly is the mutual affection between Baoyu and Daiyu. He assured her that she the only one in his heart other than Grandmother and his parents and renounced "a jade to match the gold" (Baoyu's cousin Bao-chai possessed a gold locket). The boy might be all wrapped up in his thoughts for Dai-yu but owing to his eccentricity he failed to convey them to her. For a long time his feeling for her had been a very peculiar one: one that was stippled with anticipation but fear. A sense of morbid sensibility overcame him and rendered the relationship teetering on a precipice. They would contrive to speak circuitously, proceeded in a beat-around-the-bush manner to probe each other to see if the feeling was reciprocated. The outcome was an awkward situation in which both parties concealed their real emotions and assumed counterfeit ones in an endeavor to find out what the real feelings of the other party were. It was not surprising that a paltry misunderstanding could throw Dai-yu into a seasonable sorrow, which found its expression in a violent outburst of grief.
While sibling rivalries drove the first volume to a climax in which Baoyu's life was threatened, adultery seized the attention and broke the monotonous formality of the family. Xi-feng caught her husband in bed with this omnivorously promiscuous creature, the wife of the cook, and vented her anger on her able maid. Terribly unjustly treated and humiliated in front of a crowd, the maid dashed from the scene and vowed to stab herself to claim her innocence in the matter. Domestic drama like adultery, match-making, money matters, and forced appropriation of a maid to be concubine expose not only the women's being at the mercy of men but to the interest character analysis Baoyu's tenderness and understanding in handling the girls around him. His consideration for his personal maid Aroma, his solicitous effort to appease Patience of the injustice to which she was subjected, and his punctilious caring the Skybright in sick bed, all confirmed the illusions the fairy had shown him in Volume 1. His surreptitious excursion at to the temple to mourn Golden, who had taken her own life at Baoyu's wrongdoing, also showed remarkable understanding and sentiment in his relations to the girls even though they were only his servants.
The rapprochement between Daiyu and Bao-chai also strikes a significant note in Volume 2. Fate might have paired up the crimson pearl flower and the stone, but the Jias had always deemed holders of the jade and golden locket a perfect match. Knowing Bao-chai is his parents' favorite and found favor with everyone, Daiyu had always harbored a resentment toward Bao-chai. She was jealous of her and hated to hear the praise of Bao-chai's kindness and virtue, which she deemed skeptically as a cover up for some secret vices. It was not until Bao-chai, who out of her volition made frequent visits to the illness afflicted Dai-yu and offered her bird's nest soup and kept her company that Dai-yu realized she had been wrong about her. Bao-chai's gesture of kindness finally broke the ice and it dawned on Daiyu that Bao-chai really did care about her. This laid the ground for the mistaken marriage between Baoyu and Bao-chai.
As the text becomes more concretized as opposed to the illusion and mystery, one becomes familiar with the traditions, culture, and formality of a highborn Chinese household. Wealthy families usually populate with troops of concubines and half-siblings. Proliferation of extended family and the retinue of maids, junior maids, women servants staffing the domestic hierarchy were reflections of a family's grandeur and status. Concubine appropriation bespoke the weak-willed, complacent nature of women who, at that time, were at the mercy of men. For the sake of a quiet life and financial security, a married woman would tolerate sharing a husband with concubines and please her husband at all cost.
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black magic spell that had befallen Baoyu and his cousin Wang Xi-feng owing to the concubine's vicious scheme to rid the only heir of the Jias. A Taoist restored the power of Baoyu's jade, which had been inevitably contaminated and thus divested of its visceral power by worldly lust and temptation. Again above the novel hangs the constant reminder of another dimension of existence, scrupulously governed by Buddhist beliefs. The narrative of Volume 2 is firmly grounded in the Jia's domestic life and the world's affairs. An affluence of prose devotes to the cousins' founding of the poetry club in the Prospect Garden, The Crab-Flower Club. The story now becomes entwined with the conceiving, writing and critique of poems. Although this volume is deprived of the excitement of magic, it holds significant value in Chinese literature. The text proliferates with passages containing references to books, plays, and poetry that to most readers, lacking the literary background that Cao Xueqin was able to take for granted in his Chinese contemporaries that are quite difficult to read. The characters made frequent allusions to the Four Books, Five Classics, and Complete Poems of the Tang Dynasty, literature that were among the syllabi for civil service examination and reading lists of well-nurtured youngsters. Lin Daiyu composed lines that demonstrated a form of poetry that became perfected in the 18th century known as regulated verse. Regulated verse exploits the characteristic tonality of the Chinese language, using an extremely rigid formal structure in which tension is created by combining tonal contrast with verbal parallelism.
Daiyu's verses reveal effort of deep thought and grief in her morbidly austere relationship with Baoyu. As banal as the domestic life this volume so tediously portrays, an important fact one can conceive out of the family's daily hurly-burly is the mutual affection between Baoyu and Daiyu. He assured her that she the only one in his heart other than Grandmother and his parents and renounced "a jade to match the gold" (Baoyu's cousin Bao-chai possessed a gold locket). The boy might be all wrapped up in his thoughts for Dai-yu but owing to his eccentricity he failed to convey them to her. For a long time his feeling for her had been a very peculiar one: one that was stippled with anticipation but fear. A sense of morbid sensibility overcame him and rendered the relationship teetering on a precipice. They would contrive to speak circuitously, proceeded in a beat-around-the-bush manner to probe each other to see if the feeling was reciprocated. The outcome was an awkward situation in which both parties concealed their real emotions and assumed counterfeit ones in an endeavor to find out what the real feelings of the other party were. It was not surprising that a paltry misunderstanding could throw Dai-yu into a seasonable sorrow, which found its expression in a violent outburst of grief.
While sibling rivalries drove the first volume to a climax in which Baoyu's life was threatened, adultery seized the attention and broke the monotonous formality of the family. Xi-feng caught her husband in bed with this omnivorously promiscuous creature, the wife of the cook, and vented her anger on her able maid. Terribly unjustly treated and humiliated in front of a crowd, the maid dashed from the scene and vowed to stab herself to claim her innocence in the matter. Domestic drama like adultery, match-making, money matters, and forced appropriation of a maid to be concubine expose not only the women's being at the mercy of men but to the interest character analysis Baoyu's tenderness and understanding in handling the girls around him. His consideration for his personal maid Aroma, his solicitous effort to appease Patience of the injustice to which she was subjected, and his punctilious caring the Skybright in sick bed, all confirmed the illusions the fairy had shown him in Volume 1. His surreptitious excursion at to the temple to mourn Golden, who had taken her own life at Baoyu's wrongdoing, also showed remarkable understanding and sentiment in his relations to the girls even though they were only his servants.
The rapprochement between Daiyu and Bao-chai also strikes a significant note in Volume 2. Fate might have paired up the crimson pearl flower and the stone, but the Jias had always deemed holders of the jade and golden locket a perfect match. Knowing Bao-chai is his parents' favorite and found favor with everyone, Daiyu had always harbored a resentment toward Bao-chai. She was jealous of her and hated to hear the praise of Bao-chai's kindness and virtue, which she deemed skeptically as a cover up for some secret vices. It was not until Bao-chai, who out of her volition made frequent visits to the illness afflicted Dai-yu and offered her bird's nest soup and kept her company that Dai-yu realized she had been wrong about her. Bao-chai's gesture of kindness finally broke the ice and it dawned on Daiyu that Bao-chai really did care about her. This laid the ground for the mistaken marriage between Baoyu and Bao-chai.
As the text becomes more concretized as opposed to the illusion and mystery, one becomes familiar with the traditions, culture, and formality of a highborn Chinese household. Wealthy families usually populate with troops of concubines and half-siblings. Proliferation of extended family and the retinue of maids, junior maids, women servants staffing the domestic hierarchy were reflections of a family's grandeur and status. Concubine appropriation bespoke the weak-willed, complacent nature of women who, at that time, were at the mercy of men. For the sake of a quiet life and financial security, a married woman would tolerate sharing a husband with concubines and please her husband at all cost.
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LibraryThing member xuebi
In the second volume of Hawkes' five-volume translation of The Story of the Stone, life for the Jia family goes on surrounded by luxury and literature. This volume, though not as fanciful as the first, expertly portrays life for an upper-class Chinese family and their corresponding material
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culture. Hawkes' translation is adept at bringing this far-removed world closer and once more, the translation is fluent and reads well. As I mentioned in my review for the first volume, I have some issues with the liberal translations of the poetry but these are small in comparison to the good work Hawkes has already accomplished. Show Less
LibraryThing member xiaomarlo
Better than volume 1, which I also quite liked. These have both been very interesting portrayals of aristocratic life in Qing China. So decadent and rigidly hierarchical, and transgressions are met with such ferocity and violence. Feudalism and aristocracy be crazy, yo. At the same time as reading
At the same time, I just really enjoy reading about Chinese history and culture. I love the level of detail Cao brings, painting word-pictures of the everyday goings-on of the Jia estate. Learning about history is an ongoing, never-ending process. There are always more gaps to fill in. This book certainly helps with that.
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this, I've been listening to a history of the French revolution podcast, and yeah, I totally get why peasants revolt and try to overthrow the system.At the same time, I just really enjoy reading about Chinese history and culture. I love the level of detail Cao brings, painting word-pictures of the everyday goings-on of the Jia estate. Learning about history is an ongoing, never-ending process. There are always more gaps to fill in. This book certainly helps with that.
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LibraryThing member yarb
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
Xi-Feng continues to bring the spice to this otherwise fairly insipid hotpot, orchestrating pranks on good old Grannie 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.
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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 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.
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Language
Original language
Chinese
Physical description
608 p.; 6.69 inches
ISBN
0140443266 / 9780140443264