A Floating Life [Hardcover]

Simon Elegant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 30, 1999

History and legend brilliantly combine in this bawdy "autobiographical" account of the life of famed rabble-rousing Chinese versemaker Li Po. A Floating Life is a magnificent portrayal of a critical time in China's history and the life of a literary legend. Nearly 1,300 years after the fact, Simon Elegant's scrupulously researched novel captures the essence of the eccentric bard of spontaneous verse in full splendor and bravado.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Elegant draws on his background as China scholar and arts and society editor for the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review to craft a richly embellished "autobiographical" novel of T'ang dynasty poet Li Po. As the novel opens, a boy named Wang has been sent by his father to serve as amanuensis to the great poet, who wants to tell his life story. Wang discovers a larger-than-life character who has drunk himself into a stupor at a great celebration on a river barge yet is robustly at work the next morning. His dictation turns into a wildly inventive torrent of escapades, from his flight on the back of an eagle as a young boy to his encounter with the emperor. Throughout, Li Po remains a vivid, raucous presence, and his story is told in language as gorgeous, delicate, and precise as one would find in one of his poems, "Ah, this floating life, like a dream" wrote Li Po. The novel is a dream, too. Highly recommended.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Historical fiction about a legendary literary rascal, in a first novel by a Hong Kongbased editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review . Thirteen centuries ago, the Chinese poet Li Po pursued life with a ferocious appetite, being both admired for his verse and notorious for his untrammelled behavior at the court of the Emperor Hsuan Tsung and, later, on the loose pursuing his fortune in the T'ang Dynastyera countryside. Writing in the roisterous spirit of the story's hero, Elegant probes the mythology of the poet in a series of linked tales told in the first person by Li Po to Wang Lung, who is the poet's cringing yet dogged young amanuensis. These stories are especially engrossing when they're most earthy and ribald--for instance, when the illustrious versifier, temporarily down and out, takes a job working as an assistant for a mute and ailing butcher's minion at a pig slaughterhouse. The tale of the doleful downfall of the exploited minion, Pigboy, and the sad lot of his hopeless animal victims (whom he secretly respects and loves) is visceral, violent, and unmercifully moving, a transparently moral and emotional interlude in a chronicle otherwise filled with purely rambunctious action. The structural looseness of Elegant's historical re-creation is appropriate to the picaresque genre, and yet a lack of depth in the author's portrayal of his protagonist does limit the book's impact and imaginative reach. As a wanton and a renegade, Li Po is great fun, but he's also somewhat narrowly drawn; it's hard to sympathize very much with a guy who's shown over and over again to be fundamentally foolish and stereotypically naughty. In the end, Elegant's work seems an entertaining piece of exotica that deliberately avoids deeper things, depending instead on cheekiness and some ingenious flourishes. The story of an ancient Chinese prototype of Charles Bukowski. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1st edition (July 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880015594
• ISBN-13: 978-0880015592
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #517,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sublime melancholy, like a good bowl of Huangjiu, December 11, 2002

By 

Elisabeth W. Movius (Shanghai China) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Floating Life: The Adventures of Li Po: A Historical Novel (Paperback)

Anything written from the Zhuangzi/Daoist point of view, from Lin Yutang's 'Moment in Peking' on down the sadly short list, shows an entirely different portrait of China than we are used to seeing. Amid the conformity, an eccentric; amid the tradition, a progressive; amid the acquiescence, a rebel; amid the herd, an individual. The tide never has, and probably never will, turn, but it is nice to know that there will always be those willing to swim joyously against it.

Li Po, or Li Bai as he is called in standard Mandarin, is one of those rare such characters in Chinese history, and Simon Elegant brings him convincingly to life, a man of flesh and blood and spirit.

I know little of Li Bai; here in China he is much memorialized but less remembered, so the tales in "Floating Life" are as much as I know about the mythology beyond the repute of the poems. I'm sure Elegant did his research, though, and it makes for an engaging tale.

The device of the acolyte/narrator is awkward at times, and the breaks away from Li Bai's voice cause the book's progression to stumble, but it does allow the tale to be told in first person and without overly rigorous chronology. Li Bai's tales, told through his perspective, witty and insightful, are what make the book.

And the book does justice to Li Bai's poetry and ethic. Reading it, one gets lost in the quiet moment, as if downing a bowl of warm Huangjiu in a boat on the West Lake at dusk. Simple, sublime. Li Bai did many things, and is enshrined in the catacombs of history, but what matters is that he knew how to be happy, how to live in the moment.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There is another heaven and earth beyond the world of men., June 5, 1998

By 

Dan Brooks ([e-mail]) (Claymont, DE) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Floating Life (Hardcover)

Simon Elegant's first fictional work is one of the best historical and/or biographical novels I've ever read! Li Po is many things, but bashful is not one of them. He tells his adventurous "life story" to a young boy named Wang Lung, who dutifully copies it down as an excercise in learning to write. As they sail together, banished, and waiting for a "reprive", the reader learns how Li Po has come to his banishment.

Li Po was a poetic genius. Elegant treats the reader to his wonderful verse amid his drunken-ness, his love affairs, and his honored time with the Emperor. Li Po is brought to one's eyes as a man so fully human, it is hard to believe he lived almost 1300 years ago.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun to Read and Entertaining, May 17, 2004

By 

Randy Farnsworth (Northern Utah, Near the Lake, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Floating Life (Hardcover)

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Reviewed by Randy Farnsworth, author of "A Stand Yet Taken".

As a longtime student of Chinese history, I was intrigued when I came across this book. Chinese history, particularly ancient China, has always fascinated me, and this novel didn't let me down. However, it started out a bit slow, and after 20 pages or so, I almost put it aside for something more interesting. The topic may not appear too exciting at first - the life story of a poet in eighth-century China - and it does have a slow start, but A Floating Life is actually a fun book and quite exciting at times.

Li Po is a real person, and has had a great influence even to this day. When my Chinese-born wife saw what I was reading, she immediately quoted some of Li Po's poetry and told me how he was always drunk. Simon Elegant takes some liberties with the story, but this is a novel after all, not a history book, so don't expect everything to be totally accurate.

The writing style is interesting: Simon Elegant uses present tense, third-person omniscience for the "present" time of the story, where Li Po is interacting with a young student who has agreed to write down the poet's story in return for instruction in the classic arts. Elegant then switches to past tense, first person limited viewpoint as Li Po relates his adventures. The reader is taken back and forth between the present and past and in a few places it's somewhat awkward, causing me to stop and figure out where in the timeline I was. But most of the transitions are smooth, and the present story fits in well with the past, especially as the two stories meet in the end.

As Elegant tries to convey a sense of setting and background, he describes with elegant (sorry :-) ) details the life, customs and culture of the time he is writing about. At first I thought he was really going overboard, just trying to show off his knowledge of the era with all the minute facts he could include, whether or not they added to the story. But the problem with my complaint is, they really do add to the story and hurl the reader back in time to Imperial China.

The book isn't perfect, though, as no book is, and if you're not into historical novels in general and Chinese history in particular, you may not find this too interesting. For example, Elegant spends a whole page or more just describing what the emperor served for dinner. I enjoyed reading that; it reminded me of some fancy banquets I attended while living in Asia. But some readers would just scan through that in an effort to get to the real story.

Also, I still don't see the need for any author to offend the reader with vulgar language. We all know that some people talk like that in real life, but we don't need to read it. It really adds absolutely nothing to the book and in reality, detracts from it. That said, however, I appreciate the fact that Elegant doesn't dwell too long on sex and violence. He lets us know that the world of Li Po was a violent place and briefly mentions some of the brutality, but doesn't disgust the reader with a play-by-play. Ditto on the sex scenes.

Lastly, I don't know if Elegant has downloaded a dictionary into his brain or what, but he sure uses some obscure language in places. I didn't mind that, but I had to keep a dictionary handy to look up some of the words.