Customer Reviews

Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series)

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Like the previous reviewer, I'm only familiar with the original version of this work, which is something like 2000 pps, written in a classical Chinese utterly incomprehensible to your ordinary Chinese college graduate. Qian carried out what Benjamin, dying young, failed to complete, a book not written, but quoted. That is, at least 90% of this immense book is made up of quotes, in Latin, Italian, German, French, English, and of course Chinese. This sort of undertaking requres imagination as well as learning, not to say a real appetite for reading practically anything. By the way, Qian wrote one of the few good Chinese novels of this century, and pretty good traditional verse.

I read the Chinese edition of "Limited Views" (there are totally 5 volumes) in a span of 8 years. I only read the introduction and several key pieces of this English selection, but it is enough to convince me that Prof. Ronald Egan is as truthful as possible to the Chinese text. Nevertheless I will focus my review on the Chinese edition. I still remember the excitement and confusion when Qian's masterpiece came into my life. It was a total amazement to see an author being able to cite so many Western books without any effort. As a Taiwanese youth, I learned names of lots of great Western thinkers and their works. But we really didn't have much time and energy to "touch their souls alive", as often being said of reading books. Then a few years later I realized that some of the ancient Chinese books he cited are even harder for common people to find, let alone to read and understand. My friend Shu-I once commented: He is just showing off how many books he has read! But I think Qian has a plan behind this massive work. Qian proposed an altervative to the commonly-accpeted and yet futile way in which we tend to divide the whole human experience into categories like "European" or "Asian traditions" and to study them "comparatively." He showed us, mainly through the window of literature, that by studying, understanding and appreciating every bits of fragments of human thoughts, a far more enjoyable approach is at our grasp. For this aspect, he poses a striking similarity with the deconstructionists so fashionable now in acdemics. Yet he is so different from them too. He believes that somehow, through a more compassionate reading, a new level of appreciation of humanity can miraculously arise from a chaotic soup of fragmental thoughts. Maybe I am too far-stretching at this point, trying to link him with our contemporary effort to describe the process of how our consciousness emerges out of a lump of gray matter. This book is also a riddle to me. His deliberate choice of old literary Chinese as the writing language defies many Chinese readers' attempt to deciphering the books, besides the difficulty of fully comprehending the quotations he pick out of Western works. Then how could the "understanding and appreciation" which I mentioned be possible? Chinese reader might find that the English translation is easier to read, as long as she/he reads English. It does not mean that native English speakers have the advantage, since so many a layer of Chinese anecdotes and nuances will certainly frustrate a not-so-knowledgeable reader. In short, how can this book be a starting point towards the appreciation of humanity? Or does the struggling through this book metaphorically represent our will to knowledge, hence the book serves as a cold reminder of our own weakness? Suddenly I find Qian's work is the most post-modern one that I have ever read.

it's about time for an english translation of qian's work. even as a selection, this is an extraordinary difficult task, as the work is written in classical chinese prose, for all practical purposes a dead language, as dead as latin or greek, but for those who can still read it a truly wonderful medium, especially under the control of a modern master like qian. his original 4-volume work, though enormously famous in china, can hardly be understood by most chinese readers, distant as they are to their own tradition and language. so english readers should consider themselves lucky... now the question is--what exactly does qian write about? well, his work can more appropriately be called as a traditional commentary to the entire canon of chinese classics. but qian draws on his immense knowledge of the western tradition, in criticism, philosophy, poetry, novel, aesthetics, psychology, linguistics, history, etc. his footnotes appear in latin, english, french, german, italian, and of course chinese, with references from leibniz to freud, from cicero to william james, and from dante to nietzsche. this is a work of vast ambitions. qian is determined to produce something in the manner of benjamin's arcade project. we should remember that even benjamin did not quite succeed, for reasons other than his early death. and it is perhaps too early to judge qian's attempt. but in any case this is a book worth wrestling with, difficult as it may be to readers not entirely at home with 2 vast intellectual traditions (i.e. most of us). but qian's deep learning, utter humility, and sublime wit should pose a sharp contrast to certain french theorists fashionable in american colleges these days.

I've owned the formidable four volumes in Chinese for almost 20 years and have occasionally dipped into it to see what he was up to. It sure shows his amazing broad reading and erudition but I am yet to be convinced that he was more than the greatest man of quotes and writer of marginalia.

I read the Chinese version of this book for several years, I am quite sure it's the best chinese book i have ever read.

Limited Views could be seen as an anachronistic (but no less brilliant) work of Classical Chinese philology, but as another reviewer has already remarked, it is startlingly modern, deconstructionist, and even tips its hat to the melee of cultural studies. For those who lament the death of philology in the modern American university, Qian proves that, at least in its Chinese form, philological studies is still firmly at the centre of the humanities and liberal arts. Qian's extraordinary command of the languages and literatures of six or seven literary traditions should leave modern cross-cultural studies in tears of shame. But beyond that, it is Qian's familiarity with the scholarship and the intellectual history of those traditions that is most breathtaking. For a scholar emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to pen such a work is a fete none can match. This isn't to say that Limited Views is necessarily a model for reconstructing a philology, but what Qian has achieved is something that the modern division of disciplines in the humanities can never achieve while still divided. And the value of Qian's work is hard to deny.