The teens living in the garden in the YA romantasy The Story of the Stone spend a lot of time reading forbidden books, much older YA romantasys.  These books are all famous classical Chinese plays.  Cao Xueqin gives a couple of chapters early on to their reading, including a list of titles.  I figured I’d better try one of them. How about The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, written in 1598, an exciting time in English and Spanish drama, too.  The play is really an opera, partly sung and partly spoken, a monster, eighteen hours long in a complete performance, a wild mix of stories and tones. An attempt at the story: beautiful young Bridal Du begins her education with a tutor.  The explication of four lines of 2,500 year-old Chinese poetry, the limit of her education, are enough to make her curious about the outside world.  She goes for a walk in an artificial garden where, in the title’s Peony Pavilion, she falls into a dream where she meets and has sex with a stranger, an experience so powerful that after waking she soon dies.  This is one-third of the way in. Luckily the lover is real and stumbles across the garden.  After an idyllic period of ghost sex, he figures out how to resurrect Bridal Du, launching the final third of the play which is full of bandits, severed heads, mistaken identities, and heroic test-taking.  There is a scene I have never encountered in dramatic form before, Scene 41, where the test examiners grades essays: Every kind of error: what a bunch of blockheads grinding their ink for nothing, not one brush “bursts into flower.” (230) What could be more dramatic than watching a teacher grade papers? The Peony Pavilion also has comic scenes in Hell, songs about manure, comics scenes with a couple of slapstick servants, and a comic scene with a pompous government inspector.  I thought this scene must be one of the most cut – the entire opera has been performed rarely, or perhaps never before 1999 (!) – but no, it is one of the most performed, historically, often performed on its own at village festivals. The text is full of quotations and lines and entire poems from two thousand years of Chinese poetry, all identified, as above, by quotation marks and occasionally by footnote identification, but there is so much quotation that the editor gives up on identifying the authors by page 5.  The quotations are sometimes turned into dirty jokes or elaborate poetry games much like the kids play in The Story of the Stone. It is all the most amazing thing, is what I am saying, one piece of craziness after another.  Someday I will have to read more of these things, and maybe a book or two about how to read them.  Cao Xueqin clearly learned more about writing his novel from these plays than from earlier Chinese novels.  “It’s very pretty in the garden” but “[t]hat garden is a vast and lonely place” (Sc. 11, 54). Oh, why are classical plays forbidden to the 18th century youth?  One, kids are not supposed to be wasting their time with romantasys but instead reading the Five Classics and practicing calligraphy; second, the plays will give young ladies corrupting ideas about falling in love and marrying who they want rather than the dud or monster chosen by their parents. Cyril Birch is the translator.  Page references are to the Indiana University Press 2nd edition. The image is from the 1998 Peter Sellars production of The Peony Pavilion.  How I wish I had seen it. Tan Dun’s music for that production (the album is titled Bitter Love) is worth hearing.

How I wish all long novels were published in sensible multi-volume editions.  I have finished The Story of the Stone, 2,500 pages in five volumes, the last two translated by John Minford.  Cao Xueqin and his posthumous editor Gao E again share credit for authorship.  Chapters have become shorter and a few episodes seem abbreviated, but otherwise I have no sense of who did what.  Perhaps Minford smooths everything out for me. In the last 22 chapters and 380 pages the novel necessarily narrows.  Necessarily if it is going to have an ending, which in this case it does.  A series of catastrophes strike the family began hitting the family at the end of the last volume, and they only accelerate.  Disgrace, crime, debt, deaths, so many deaths, some of them expected for a long time, some real surprises.  One shocked even jaded ol’ me.  There is some resemblance to the occasional contemporary event of the Chinese billionaire who suddenly falls from party favor and is arrested for corruption. The garden, scene of so many teenage poetry games, is abandoned, a haunted ruin: The Garden’s caretakers saw nothing to be gained by staying.  They all wanted to leave the place, and invented a whole series of incidents to substantiate the presence of diabolical tree-imps and flower sprites. (Ch. 102, 72) In the next paragraph a minor character dies suddenly, perhaps as the result of sexual assault by one of those flower sprites, more monstrous than their name suggests. Subplots resolve amidst the disasters and funerals.  Story elements abandoned for 2,000 pages return.  The architecture of this novel has some long, long arcs.  Eventually, the story narrows back to Bao-yu, the boy born with the jade stone in his mouth, who had “degenerated into a complete idiot” (109, 79) to the point where I was beginning to wonder how he could continue to function as a protagonist.  But the magical monk, seen rarely but at key moments previously, returns to take our away from the earthly plane into the Daoist fairy realm.  More or less. “I know I’ve been somewhere like this before.  I remember it now.  It was in a dream.  What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!” (116, 286) Bao-yu is here in a complex dream chapter paralleling one that was well over 2,000 pages earlier, pulling together all of the major teenage female characters, dead and alive, like a last farewell to them before Bao-yu himself exits the novel just slightly ahead of the reader. But not before he – I am giving away an important part of the story – so skip ahead if this bothers you – but seriously you probably want to know this one, it is so good – not before saving his family from disgrace by getting a high score on a test. The Chief Examiner presented the successful candidates’ compositions to the throne, and His Majesty read them through one by one and found them to be well-balanced and cogent, displaying both breadth of learning and soundness of judgment…  His Majesty, as a consequence of this information, being a monarch of exceptional enlightenment and compassion, instructed his minister, in consideration of the family’s distinguished record of service, to submit a full report on their case.  (119, 351) So most of the characters, if they made it this far, get a happy ending of one kind or another.  It is not so much that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel but rather that it is the greatest Chinese novel. “What is truth, and what fiction?  You must understand that truth id fiction, and fiction truth.” (103, 94) This from another (or perhaps the same) magical monk.  The words “truth” and “fiction” are puns on the names of the two branches of the novel’s family.  Bao-yu is on the fiction side, and to the extent that Cao Xueqin is his double so is the author.  The great paradox of the novel, from beginning to end, is the contrast between the materialistic, dangerous “realistic” world of the adults with its budgets and corruption and the idyllic, fantastic world of the kite-flying, poetry-reciting teenagers in the garden, both ephemeral compared to Daoist eternity.  What then, was Cao Xueqin doing, who does not become a monk but rather writes a monumental realistic (and ant-realistic, and unrealistic) novel based on his early adolescent moment of happiness?  He finds an alternative immortality. “So it was really all utter nonsense!  Author, copyist, and reader were alike in the dark!  Just so much ink splashed for fun, a diversion!”  (120, 375, almost the last words of the novel)

What did I read in 2024? The best book I read last year was Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE).  Best books, really, in translations by Arthur Golding and Charles Martin.  My “best book of the year” answer will never be interesting.  America’s librarian Nancy Pearl asked, somewhere on Twitter, if people thought they had already read the best book they would ever encounter.  The answers were, by far, that they had not, which is even possible, for them, but I have read The Odyssey and King Lear and Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and so on, a lot of books, a lot of great, great books.  The odds are low. Maybe the best book of 2025 will be The Odyssey.  It has been a while.  My favorite book, maybe. I kept up on my French, and learned a lot of Portuguese.  A week of intensive French in a classroom in Porto helped a lot.  I could use some more of those. I read some long books: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (1110), Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), the first 2,200 pages or so of Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (c. 1760) and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1931), barely over six hundred pages but in such difficult French that I am counting it, am I ever. I built little projects around several books, piling more Persian books around Shanameh and Chinese literature around The Story of the Stone.  I did the same thing during the summer with Arabic literature while reading The Arabian Nights (13th c.) in Husain Haddawy’s great, not especially long, translation, adding modern poetry by Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish and a novel and book of stories by Naguib Mahfouz.  My kind of fun. Let’s see.  I read nine Percival Everett books, including James (2024) just a bit before everyone else read it.  How odd it felt to have read anew book that so many other people were reading. The best contemporary book I read, though, was easily Judi Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.  It is “Dench and her interviewer friend working through every Shakespeare role she ever did, all of which she still has memorized,” enormously pleasurable for those of us who enjoy such things. What will I read in 2025? Some more long books, I hope.  I have barely over a hundred pages of The Story of the Stone left.  I enjoyed John Cowper Powys’s eccentric Wolf Solent (1929) last summer and will try The Glastonbury Romance (1932), preposterously long, any day now.  Then what – The Tale of Genji?  Another of the big Chinese monsters?  Maybe Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad?  Someday, anyway, with luck. If Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75) counts as one novel, which it does not, that will be one of my long ones.  Brad “Neglected Books” Bigelow is hosting a year-long readalong, one short novel per month.  I just finished the first book, A Question of Upbringing (1951) and will tag along for a while.  Unfortunately discussions will be on Zoom but what are ya gonna do, who wants to write anything anymore. Speaking of which, in the spirit of reading the Greek plays, I would like to begin a Not Shakespeare project, let’s say next fall, where I read and write about not all but many of the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, The Spanish Tragedy, those folks, not that one could not also read some Shakespeare along the way.  A play every two weeks maybe?  If anyone is interested in joining in, please let me know. The WPA poster can be found at the Library of Congress site.  I have put it up before.  It is full of truth.

A different kind of month with a different category of reading. CHINA Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (5th-13th cent.), tr. David Hinton – The teenagers in The Story of the Stone play various games based on their memorization of massive amounts of classical Chinese poetry.  I revisited an arbitrary sliver of it, the “mountains and rivers” school, in David Hinton’s Buddhist-leaning translation.  It made the Qing games look artificial and perhaps decadent.  But it also emphasized a difficulty, or pleasure, of the vast length of the Chinese tradition.  English-speaking children in the 18th century, or today, could not memorize and play games using thousand-year-old English poems.  No such thing, no such language. The Story of the Stone, Vol. 3: The Warning Voice & The Story of the Stone, Vol. 4: The Debt of Tears (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin – Please look here and here for notes on these books. Selected Stories (1918-26), Lu Xun – The Chinese literary tradition must have been oppressive in some ways, but here a young modern writer revitalizes the Chinese short story using the same tools that European and American writers were using: Turgenev and Chekhov. Love in a Fallen City (1944), Eileen Chang – And here is another writer fully aware of her own tradition – one story even has what sure looks like a parody of a bit of The Story of the Stone – while pulling in every outside influence available. Cold Mountain Poems (1958) & Riprap (1959), Gary Snyder – The other direction, an American poet immersed in Chinese poetry.  The first little book is a translation of Cold Mountain, the most “outsider” of the great “mountains and rivers” poets, while Riprap is Snyder’s absorption of the sensibility into his own voice. Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor, Bondservant and Master (1966), Jonathan D. Spence – He uses a different orthography, but Ts’ao Yin is also Cao Yin, the grandfather of Cao Xueqin, author of China’s greatest novel.  Chinese scholars, in search of the actual characters and the actual teenage fairy tale garden, had tracked down every scrap available about Cao Xueqin’s family history, giving Spence the material to write a dissertation on the social history of the period focused on one figure.  Cao Xueqin’s grandfather was analogous to today’s Chinese billionaire, managing companies in close cooperation with the state but part of a power structure distinct from the government bureaucracy.  Spence explained a lot of my puzzles about the background of the novel. MFA Highlights: Arts of China (2013) – Presumably an author or authors are involved but I could not figure that out.   Because of its maritime wealth, Bostonians have given their Museum of Fine Arts has an outstanding collection of Chinese art, some of it on display here.  If you are reading The Story of the Stone, do not hesitate to visit your nearest Asian art collection.  The ceramics and clothing, in particular, were a big help.  For example, the silk robe pictured uses a peacock-feather-wrapped thread that is featured in a heroic sewing scene in the novel.  Useful to see that in person.   FICTION The Female Quixote (1752), Charlotte Lennox – Please see this post. The Crucible  (1953), Arthur Miller Nights at the Alexandra (1987), William Trevor Every Arc Bends Its Radian (2024), Sergio de la Pava – His last novel packed with American football, I wondered if this new novel was some kind of compromise with his agent, since it is, for a while, a detective novel.  But no, it goes off – actually literally gets on – the rails and turns into another novel entirely, one likely to bore and mystify mystery fans.  Some of it bored me.  But I enjoy de la Pava’s voice and intelligence, and he seems to be writing the books he wants to write.   IN  FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE La fleur de l'age (1949), Colette – More little bits of Colette.  Back to the music hall and so on.  A theme of love among the aged, there in the title, is new. Fidelidade (1958), Jorge de Sena Becket (1959), Jean Anouilh