4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Passable Summary, Otherwise Unhelpful, December 28, 2008
This review is from: CliffsNotes on Tsao Hsueh-chin's Dream of the Red Chamber (Paperback)
Cao Xueqin (Tsao Hsueh-Chin)'s
Dream of the Red Chamber (aka "The Story of the Stone") is one of the great works of Chinese literature, but its length and vast list of dramatis personae can seem overwhelming. Ideally, these Cliffs Notes, by Zhang Xiugui, would help dispel that sensation.
Zhang's chapter summaries are decent and may help the reader orient themselves in the epic story of the Jia family. As the book itself aptly warns, the notes are no substitute for the original; with only a paragraph or two to devote to each of the novel's 120 chapters, Zhang selects two or three salient events from each, while countless smaller incidents are necessarily left by the wayside.
This, unfortunately, is where the book's usefulness ends. Zhang's commentary, sprinkled throughout the summaries, clings to an outdated Maoist line that reads the entire book as an indictment of the old, "feudal" system. Zhang allegorizes the characters to the point of forgetting their humanity; for him, these are not people who happen to have sympathies for or against the old ways, but symbols that point to the inevitable decline of the corrupt traditional system and the glory of defying the same.
After the summaries are several essays on the book, but they are all written by Professor Zhang and are all crippled by the same bias as his commentary. In one essay, Zhang goes so far as to lament that Cao Xueqin shows any sympathy at all for the declining Jia family, which, he says, reveals the author's unconscious but unfortunate identification with his own class. (A more nuanced perspective would be that these characters may be members of a corrupt system, but their suffering is real and affecting just the same.) A list of "Suggested Essay Topics" at the end of the book mostly revolves around the regurgitation of the viewpoint expressed throughout. Several genealogical charts are included, but they are less helpful than those in
David Hawkes's translation. Finally, the selected bibliography, at least, may be an aid to finding more balanced sources.
These notes might be just enough for a reader, especially a first-time reader, who just wants to get a grip on what's happening in the novel. Unfortunately, Zhang's relentless ideologizing robs the notes of any greater value. With a work as deep and challenging as the Red Chamber to write about, it's a shame Zhang refuses to spare the reader any genuine insights into the text.
~
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
PC Cliffs Notes, keeps Maoist line on Chinese classic, August 6, 2005
This review is from: CliffsNotes on Tsao Hsueh-chin's Dream of the Red Chamber (Paperback)
I found the Cliffs Notes very helpful in keeping straight the 400+ characters in Tsao Hsueh-chin's great classic novel of life in a declining aristocratic family in 18th century China. I was reading the Beijing Foreign Languages Press translation. I'd read several chapters of the text, then would read the Notes to be sure I was keeping the characters straight.
Zhang Xiugui, the author of the Notes, is clearly keeping alive the class-warfare flame of the Cultural Revolution, decades after that world view has been discarded by just about everyone else in China. If you can life with that, the Notes will help you get more out of what is one of the very greatest classics of world literature.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
An alternative is Knoerle's "The Dream of red Chamber: A Critical Study", July 19, 2011
This review is from: CliffsNotes on Tsao Hsueh-chin's Dream of the Red Chamber (Paperback)
An alternative is Jeanne Knoerle's "The Dream of Red Chamber: A Critical Study", which analyzes the aesthetic dimensions through western literary precepts, and which explores the ethical / cultural / religious dimensions of the novel.
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