This is a remarkable book about the difficulties of understanding King Lear, and also 20th-century Chinese history. It turns out that thinking about them alongside each other is both illuminating and clarifying. Not in the sense that anything is totally explained, but rather that some of the strangeness is distilled; it becomes possible to articulate various absurdities and inspect them more closely. I had never read King Lear before — I read it after reading the first page of this book, realizing that not only would it make this book more rewarding, but that this was a good incentive to do something I should have done a long time ago anyway. I was stunned; bewildered by the myriad plots and disguises, aghast at the sadism. And already I was thinking, ooooh, thinking about this in relation to Chinese history will be fascinating. And sure enough, it is.
I would not call this book a memoir — the central topic is not the author, nor her life. Though she shares some stories of her experiences, rarely do they involve descriptions of her feelings at the time. Often, these anecdotes slip subtly into a lightly abstracted second person (“Peking opera makes you feel alive because you’re at the end of the end of something, and every one onstage and in the audience seems like the last of their kind”). But there are occasional flashes of vulnerability, or, charmingly, of personality (“You see, the chapter is supposed to be funny”). Still, though, the majority of the book is discussions of the play (and the history of its translation and staging in China) and accounts of 20th-century China, particularly of its more horrific aspects. But I wouldn’t call it a depressing book, either, perhaps because it pulses with real intellectual curiosity. I suppose this comes with an element of detachment that some might find unsettling — to me it’s deeply comfortable and familiar. And I would insist that it is animated by a real passion for ideas, and a determined effort to find meaning, to unflinchingly face things as they are. And finally, there is the prose, which is both elegant and sharp, with many fantastic lines that you’ll stop to reread and savor (“the play feels like a tetherball whipping around its own pole.”). All in all, a complicated and heady book, but an incredibly absorbing one — I didn’t want to put it down.
Kasia Reads 