Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo [Hardcover]

Wang Xiaobo (Author), Hongling Zhang (Translator), Jason Sommer (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2007

The first English translation of work by Wang Xiaobo, one of the most important writers of twentieth-century China.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Reading popular, irreverent Chinese essayist and novelist Wang, who died in 1997 at 44, can feel like being held upside down—particularly during the zingy sex scenes. Characters cultivate an artful irrelevance to circumvent official stricture, and fail most every time. In the first work, "2015," the narrator's uncle, Wang Er, is a painter without a government permit to paint; his paintings are so stridently fractal that they make people dizzy. Sent for re-education, he readily admits his stupidity, but is undone when a female guard takes a very twisted interest in him. "The Golden Age" concerns another Wang Er: a 21-year-old, well-endowed Beijing student sent to the Yunan countryside during the Mao period. There, he runs off with a married doctor. Told to confess on returning, Wang, ironically, becomes a writer, as his superiors insist on more and more pornographic detail in every revised version of his confessions. The slighter final story, "East Palace, West Palace," relates a story about a policeman who falls in love with a bisexual cross-dresser. Wang's deeply convincing novellas will certainly please the readers who have enjoyed recent Nobel Prize–winner Gao Xingjian's novel, Soul Mountain.(Mar.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Wang (1952-97) has a large following among Chinese university students but isn't at all popular with the literary establishment. Blame the matter and attitude of his work, not its literary merit. China has a history of heavy-handed prudishness that the sex in these three novellas flouts big time. They're wry social-realist exercises demonstrating that in a repressive society, whether of the future, the Cultural Revolution, or post-Mao but still policed 1990s China, sex affords the only excitement worth risking slander or prison for. And if it weren't for imagination, sex might be drab. If the narrator of "2015" weren't obsessed with being an artist, would he so ardently follow his artist uncle's misadventures, which eventuate in being a luscious policewoman's sex toy? If they could redeem their reputations, would the lovers undergoing forcible "re-education" in "The Golden Age" breath so heavily? Would the handsome cop in "East Palace, West Palace" discover his homosexuality if he weren't such a socially determined straight arrow? Not sex but sensation, with the possibility, however slight, of transcendence, becomes the supreme value for these stories' characters--a predicament not unlike that of Jake Barnes and company in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 155 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press; First Edition edition (March 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791470652
• ISBN-13: 978-0791470657
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #560,895 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a great novelist discovered, May 7, 2007

By 

Y. Xia (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo (Hardcover)

A poet tells you about himself and a novelist brings knowledge of the world. In Wang's writings we see the absurdity in China under the totalitarian rule from a compeletly different angle - yet how enlightening it is! - that power by its masochist nature has found its sadist victims. Reading through these stories marked by Wang's now famous witty and satire tone, you laugh with heavy sighs yet at same time, strangely, don't feel depressed. Other than the value of love itself Wang has tried to explore in stories like Golden Age, an important reason for this is that he has shown you a way to understand absurdity in life, by his super intelligence and the power of his calm and acute observation. As Kundera once noted: "All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That is the raison d'être of the art of the novel."

So when we read about Chen Qingyang's laments and her sudden epiphany of "so-called truth" - "The truth is that you can't wake up. That was the moment she finnaly figured out what the world was made of; and the next moment she made up her mind: she stepped forward to accept the torment. She felt unusually happy." Don't we also feel unusually sad and happy at same time? Sad at seeing "that ineluctable defeat" part of life, happy at the final understanding of the absurdity made of her living. That's the enjoyment of reading a good novel.

Hats off to the great translation done by Zhang and Sommers. Wang deserves such a first-class English version for his wonderful work.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent: Clever, Entertaining, Sexy, March 4, 2009

By 

William Donnelly (Pompton lakes, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo (Paperback)

I'm not sure why I purchased this book, as I had certainly never heard of Wang Xiabao before. Perhaps I was book surfing on this or another site and it caught my curiosity. At any rate, I don't enjoy reviews which over analyze or intelectualize that which is being reviewed,so I'll make this simple: For me, a great story or novel is one which I read slowly, savoring every word because I don't want it to end,something I want to read more than once, even to the point of knowing certain sections from memory because it is so good. This book meets that criteria all the way; I hope that more of his writing will be translated into english.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful recreation of Wang's masterpieces, April 3, 2007

By 

Emily Wu (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo (Hardcover)

Congratulations to Hongling Zhang and Jason Sommer for the wonderful recreation of Wang's masterpieces. Highly recommended.