Customer Reviews

Once on a Moonless Night (Vintage International)

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress proved Dai Sijie is a magical storyteller. Once on a Moonless Night proves he is truly a great writer. The way he weaves tales of the ancient past into a completely moving contemporary story demonstrates not only his virtuoso narrative skill but also how much modern Chinese culture is shaped by its very long history in a way that is almost unimaginable in the West. In addition, what the story has to tell us about the ways language defines us, ways we don't even notice, is nothing less than profound. This is by far the more satisfying and magnificently written novel I have read this year--and that is counting The White Tiger, Cutting For Stone, Netherland and 2666. My book club hasn't yet picked a book in hardcover, but I will be recommending this one. I will be more than glad to read it again soon. In fact, that was the urge I had as soon as I'd turned the last page.

In 1978 the French student attends the University of Peking studying Chinese literature when she is hired as a translator between the Chinese representatives and a western movie crew wanting to make a film on the last Emperor Puyi. At the meeting she learns of the mysterious second century Buddhist sutra written in an unknown language that the emperor inherited. She becomes obsessed with translating this treasure. The student finds out about the sutra's history in the twelfth century when the Japanese incarcerates Puyi; who apparently ripped it in half and tossed it from a plane.

The student further learns from street stand seller Tumchooq that his father Paul d'Ampere did some work on the half found by her maternal family; her mom is curator at the museum of the Forbidden City. D'Ampere went to prison for twenty five years until he died. The student-narrator aborts the baby she had with Tumchooq and leaves for France after he left the city motivated by to seek the missing half. She tracks him in Burma in 1990, but he is arrested and deported to Laos.

This is a complex well written historical novel that either grips the audience thoroughly with its poetic look back in time or turns off the readers with its flowery description of the past. Case in point is some of the passages go on and on and on with incredible depth like the historian looking at the ancient emperor's love of the art of calligraphy. Character driven including the prized sutra that seems to have a life of its own, ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT is not for everyone as the action in spite of imprisonment in several eras and locales is limited to musings.

Harriet Klausner

What a fascinating book. On the surface it is part language study, part romance, and part mystery. It also has adventure, tragedy and awakening. Deeper, it takes the reader on a trip through a millennium.

Sijie, though writing in French, maintains a Chinese style of story telling. We always sense there is something more just outside our conscious understanding of what we're reading. His use of historical figures provides the basis for the quests that follow.

I have no skill in learning languages. Perhaps because of this, I am fascinated by the efforts to come to grips with those that are little known. That, by itself, was enough to keep me turning the pages. Reading the Product Description and Editorial Reviews will tell you enough about the plot.

The author weaves the story through both the beauty of ancient Chinese culture and the restrictions of modern day China. Fluidly written and well translated, this was a pleasure to read.

There is a depth to the story that goes beyond the basic storyline, and I think parts will come back to mind in the days ahead. I heartily recommend this to any who enjoy international fiction.

Some books are easy to describe. You start at the beginning, discuss the plot, main characters and conflict, and avoid revealing any major surprises to would-be readers. But ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT, the latest from BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS author Dai Sijie, is not so easy to write about. With shifting points of view, a barely linear progression of action, and stories within stories, this novel is complex and highly literary.

ONCE ON MOONLESS NIGHT is narrated by a French scholar of Asian and African languages. As a young student she spent time, in 1978 and 1979, in a newly opened China, studying. With social, cultural and economic tensions running high in Peking, she begins a relationship with a bright young man who worked in her neighborhood greengrocer's shop. Tumchooq Zhong, named for an ancient, almost lost language, was raised by his mother without knowing his father until he was older. His absent father was another French scholar, Paul d'Ampere, who turned his back on his wealthy European heritage for Chinese citizenship. His adult life was devoted to finding a scrap of ancient text, a legendary Buddhist sutra, written on silk, in the Tumchooq language. His obsession was so widely known that he was rumored to have traded his wife for the scrap.

In any case, he spent the last years of his life in a horrific Chinese labor camp, a prisoner of the state. d'Ampere's abandonment, forced or otherwise, of his family mirrors Tumchooq's abandonment of his French girlfriend years later when, after his father's death, he picks up the search for the sutra and leaves her, unaware of her pregnancy.

The unnamed narrator returns to France and spends the next years studying, teaching and thinking about Tumchooq (the language and the man). Meanwhile, Tumchooq moves forward on his same path --- trying to understand the father he barely knew, fully know the language he was named for, and find the missing silk scrap of sutra. Their stories are intertwined with those of d'Ampere, various Chinese scholars, politicians and nobles, and even such figures as Marco Polo.

ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT is an elegant and thoughtful novel. It explores scholarship as a passionate affair and religion as a holistic worldview, identity and oppression, literature, hope and romance. It is also a celebration of the joy of a good story. Sijie delights in storytelling generally and telling this story in particular. Language is another central theme. Written and spoken, language has powers and weaknesses: here it has the power to heal from madness and despair but also the power to drive people to obsession.

Sijie's latest must be read carefully. It requires full concentration because of the stories nested within other stories, the tangle of characters, and the scope of action from ancient China to the contemporary communist state. Sijie references many other works of literature, and attentive readers will be rewarded. This is a difficult but worthwhile and captivating novel with a beautiful ending sure to resonate with its audience.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

I really wanted to like this book. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is one of my favorites and I looked forward to reading Once on a Moonless Night. However, I couldn't make it past page sixty. The writing is excellent. I took no issue with that. The problem was the story. The book is heavy with history and it seemed like just as the plot was progressing, the author would go off on another (very, very long) tangent. Moreover, the tangents were not related. I like a story within a story, but that's not what was happening here. Just lots and lots of needless and drawn out history, with little plot advancement. I will undoubtedly pick up the author's next work, as I think he is a skilled writer. He just missed the mark with this one.

Dai Sijie is a novelist and filmaker from China who lives in France. I had previously read The Little Chinese Seamstress which is a charm.

His new novel - ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT is a series of tales within tales and worlds within worlds from ancient Peking with its Empresses through cultural revoltion with its labor camps in which he has fictionalized Chinese history, myths and much more . One moves through this work as if in and out of a dream.. the characters keep growing and coming forward. There are bits if archeology, ancient civilizations, the beauty and art of ancient China and Eastern philosophy - all woven together in a context that we western readers need to understand and appreciate and become swept up in - all in less than 300 pages...I hope he keeps these books coming and I look forward to finding his films... bta

This is a challenging read that is worth persisting with. Don't pick it up expecting a linear tale with a beginning, middle and end. There are stories within stories within stories. It is a novel that you are almost compelled to begin rereading as soon as you have finished the last page, and throughout my first reading I was constantly turning back and rereading sections. There is wonderful Chinese history; the Empress Cixi, of Boxer Rebellion fame, comes to life, as does the last Emperor. The ghastly prison camps and other lunacies of the Cultural Revolution. Mainly, for me, were the examples of love and devotion: Tumchooq for his father, and the Frenchwoman for Tumchooq, And the mystery of the title phrase, which is revealed in bits and scraps as you make your way through the book, until the very end.

Both intellectually and emotionally deep. I finished the last page and immediately started again at page 1. The historial expanse is breath taking, the language leaves you breathless, and the lesson leaves you gasping. It's a desert island selection that really will last a lifetime.

This is a mystical, magical book that uses words to tell a story of the importance of words and the power of religious thought. For lovers of all things Chinese, all things ancient, all things related to non-western thought, history and belief. Maybe we in the west would be better served with a dose of alternate ideas. I am recommending this to good friends and their feed-back is totally positive. One friend called it ephemeral and euphoric, so my mystical/magical is on point.

The cover of the (2009, Chatto & Windus) edition of this book I started to read is very pretty, with words & images looking as if they have been embroidered in a simplified willow pattern or orientalist type decoration. Otherwise, thanks again to the the public library system for saving me from having spent money on it.

The novel that explores an historical, intellectual, artistic, linguistic, &c mystery or problem, especially in an exotic locale (which tends to mean not the suburbs of an english-speaking country, which is where most of us live, afterall, and we know nothing so sophisticatedly interesting ever happens here)using a contemporary person and selected narrative devices to explain the past (diary, academic, grandmother, obscure or overlooked historical documents, lost paintings or architecture) is now a classic, and comes in a wide spectrum of competence. The author is let down somewhat by his translator, whose use of the term "tins" of coca-cola, jars, although presuambly all those commas were present in the original, as I should hope no one would feel the need to put that many in otherwise.

Having reached page 43, the tension created between the promise of this book and the reality was too much. Without being an expert in China and its past, I doubt very much whether a Chinese academic in the 1970s would show up to a meeting with foreigners dressed in a vaguely imperial outfit, whether he would then chat to the foreign narrator on public transport about the last emperor and his history, whether he would let her follow him into his personal room (not really a house) without comment, and keep talking to her about emperor and his behaviour. It wasn't a safe thing to do. The narrator's descriptions of the streets around her Chinese university sound more like old streets in France (what use would a haberdashery or tailor's be in China in those days?). The final straw was the document-within-the-text that was quoted as saying "At the beginning of October in the Year of the Cockerel (1862)": if this is meant to show that we're using the Chinese calendar, fine, but - they didn't then have October, and while 1862 may have been the year of the cockerel, that is to do with horoscopes, imperial China counted years by the reign of the current Emperor.

O, and in Sanskrit, verbs don't only have the passive form. Anyone with ten minutes and an interweb connection can find this out. If you need a funny language, make up one of your own, don't ruin a nice old one.

If a book is meant to be a light, casual adventure, the infelicities of accuracy can be overlooked, but for a novel claiming intellectual status - more Umberto Eco than Dan Brown, as it were -, surely a little more effort could have been made in getting the bleeding obvious correct.