Kai Lung's Golden Hours [Import] [Paperback]

Ernest Bramah (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated; New Ed edition (1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195839765
• ISBN-13: 978-0195839760
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The kind of good reading that mass media displaced, March 25, 2000

By 

The Sanity Inspector (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kai Lung's golden hours (Paperback)

If you're here for the first time, then you have my sympathy on learning that this book is out of print. It's time for a re-issue--are you listening, Penguin Classics?

These stories are about a wandering storyteller, who gets into various jams and escapes with the aid of his silver tongue and an admiring coquette. For someone who apparently never visited China, and never even met that many Chinese, the verisimilitude Bramah achieves is amazing. This is an English child's storybook China, yet the stories themselves richly delight adults, too. The scene-setting is wonderful, but the real gem is the dialogue. Suave, sly, elliptically ceremonious, mock-abnegating--but you really have to read it to catch the flavor. Hillaire Belloc's introduction is on the money about how deceptively easy this style looks, and it is a great pity that more people do not have the opportunity to enjoy this and the other Kai Lung works today.

May your sleeves be filled with a sufficiency of taels, and may hungry and homeless ghosts find solace at your house-pole, and preserve your family tablets from the mischiefs of the lesser orders of the beings of the Upper Air...

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Chinese Sheherazade, March 25, 1998

By 

Charles Blakemore ([e-mail]) (Buffalo, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kai Lung's golden hours (Paperback)

Delightful collection of tales and fables by one of the most wrongfully-neglected English writers of the 20th Century. The itinerant storyteller Kai Lung, with the assistance of the delectable Hwa Mei, must circumvent the evil machinations of Ming Shu by providing a tale suited to each arising occasion. I first read this book in the early 70's, when Lin Carter reissued it in his Ballantine Fantasy series, and fell in love with its sparkling wit and originality. It is a source of considerable perplexity (to me, anyway) and some chagrin that Bramah continues in obscurity--as a writer, he is non-pareil. Someone must reissue these things (4 in the series, I believe). Fortunately, any good library will retain copies, but once you have read them you'll want copies of your own (to sleep with, under your pillow). Sweet dreams.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There's just one thing to say...., March 4, 2000

By 

BookBug "LG" (India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kai Lung's golden hours (Paperback)

The earlier reviewers of this book have said everything there is to say (and much better than I could have said it). I am the lucky possessor of a collected volume of all the Kai Lung stories. After having read Kai Lung's golden hours and the other books in the series, there was just one thing felt : a sense of profound sadness that there isn't more of Kai Lung to read!

I am adding this in 2003. I was wrong in writing that I have the entire collection of Kai Lung books. I learnt subsequently that there are a few missed out from my collection. For the records here is the complete list of the published Kai Lung stories :

The Wallet of Kai Lung
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat
Kai Lung's Golden Hours
The Moon of Much Gladness (novel)
Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree
Kai Lung: Six

The last apparently contains six Kai Lung stories previously published ONLY in Punch magazine; the print edition for this book ran into a mere 250 copies and was published by Tacoma: The Non-Profit Press, 1974.

I have only the following :

The Wallet of Kai Lung
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat
Kai Lung's Golden Hours
Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree

Kai Lung: Six, unfortunately was published in a very limited number of copies and I am unable to acquire one at an affordable price. The Moon of Much Gladness I hope to get soon.

My thanks to one of the persons who read this review and through his queries alerted me to the fact that - as I discovered later -my Kai Lung collection was not complete.