Customer Reviews

Farewell My Concubine: Novel, A

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I hate to rain on the parade, but I found the book to be dreadful. "Farewell My Concubine" is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I was looking forward to the novel immensely, but it disappointed on virtually every level. The prose reads like the book was meant for students in junior high (though I acknowledge that might be the fault of the translator), and nothing is left to your imagination: just in case you're too thick to pick up on the fact that Dieyi, one of the main characters, is merging with his stage role, the book tells you so explicitly over and over and OVER. It's unsubtle and verges on insulting the reader's intelligence. The novel constantly violates the cardinal "Show, don't tell" rule of good writing. The three main characters, so rich and textured in the film, come out flat and two-dimensional here (Juxian is nothing more than a cipher). After a while, I pretended I was reading about three different characters entirely, just so I didn't have to associate them with the characters I loved in the film.

The movie "Farewell My Concubine" is a feast. Every time I watch it, I see something new in it, something else to admire. I couldn't believe it had emerged from this. Watch the movie, but whatever you do, don't read the novel; you'll be wasting your time.

This was beautifully written, and well-worth reading. The way Dieyi almost fuses with his opera role is unsettling and elegant, albeit melodramatic, and it is written in a way that really evokes a sympathy and affection for the characters' position. Drawn in a very rounded way, their vividity is what really jumped out from the page at me.
When you read it, you are almost drawn into the play itself because of the parallels it has to the real life of the characters. It's a comparatively short book, but packs a lot of experience into its' pages. A small but densely packed fireball! Many ends are left unfinished or unresolved, but I think this was intentional...not every story has a happy ending, particularly for people involved in political oppression..... A story of contradictions.

It was a really sad story. I feel even more sad after the actor Leslie Cheung(the one who starred Deiyi) commited suicide a couple of days ago. I cried every time I watched the movie. What is really sad about Deiyi is that he could never tell the difference between real life and the life on the stage. So did Leslie Cheung.

The characters seem so real,..you will laugh, def cry , a lot of drama,.. the characters come to life and you will swear it wasnt something you read but stories friends told you,...hard to put the book down and say goodbye to these new found friends,...buy it !

The book will deepen your understanding of the movie. The movie, brilliant as it is, plays like a "montage of highlights" and cuts out a lot--as films generally have to do--like what the two heros were doing during the eleven years before they perform one last time. It also ends differently.

(By the way, if you're in the US, unless you've seen the DVD, you've only seen part of the film. The US distributor, Miramax, cut around 20 minutes out of the film as it's seen in the rest of the world, making the already fast pace even faster.)

It was the first Chinese book for me to read. And I loved it. The whole story keeps searching for escape from the reality, but... There is nowhere to hide. Sometimes it was really hard to read it without crying tears, because Lee really tells the WHOLE story. At the end, no hope is left. No hope. This makes the novel so special.

This book is not at all what I expected. I thought I would learn a little about Chinese drama and music and instead I was able to experience it for myself. I became Dieyi after the first chapter and felt all the pain that he endured. I was able to understand and connect to why he had never learned to tell the difference from fiction and reality. It is worth reading and now I am looking foward to seeing the movie.

This book, with the Chinese opera `Farewell my Concubine' as its sublime leitmotiv, is a strong meditation on art, artists, life, love, death and politics: `Victory and defeat, flourishing and dying, all pass within the blink of an eye.'

Art, artists and the ordinary world
Real art, real artists don't belong in the ordinary world, where `you can't escape from politics', and where `it's always life or death, kill or be killed', and where `people suffer so much.'
Art transcends life, but it is also a flight from the harsh reality (outside art, outside the theatre) for the actors and for the audiences: `A performance lets the actor be someone important, while those in the audience have bought a piece of that extraordinary life. The actors bask in the admiration of hundreds of strangers, who are transported out of their small lives by the deep emotions enacted before them.'
`The actors embodied the dreams of their people, and then they went back to being objects of contempt.'

Politics, love and suffering
Chairman Mao had once said: `Nowhere in the world is there love without reason. No is there hatred without a cause. But, he had been wrong; love was by its very nature unreasoning, while hatred has a thousand causes.'
The Chinese `had known too much suffering. From the last years of the Qing dynasty, through the Japanese occupation, the civil war, the Great Leap Forward, all the way down to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. A hundred million dead. And for what? The people lead down their bodies to prop up their ruler's thrones. But when one died, there was always another one to replace him. They were an ever-renewing resource.'

With emotional, but unsentimental, evocations of deep longings, unexpressed love, bitter gratuitous resentments, depressing disappointments or sadistic public tortures, transposed in such memorable scenes as the abandonment of a child by a mother, the hard educational exercises, the public `political' confessions or the unexpected encounter of old, but not `intimate friends', Lilian Lee wrote an unforgettable masterpiece.
A must read.

I also highly recommend the movie with the same title by Chen Kaige, also a masterpiece.

The book arrived fast and in the timely manner it said it was going to. Also, the book was in the condition described. I would definitely buy again from this buyer.

Well. There is no way to begin to describe this book. Well, actually there is, so... 'Farewell to my Concubine' has an intruiging plot, capturing the hopelessness and desperation of a love that can never be. The plot is conveyd beautifully in the intense complexity of words. The characters are well written and well expressed. The conflict is subtle; there is no clear 'right' and 'wrong' in this book. All in all, it is one of the best books ever written. At least, I think so.