|
| A Private Life
ISBN: 9780231506915
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Chen Ran 1962 -- Translations into English;
"Sexuality has never been a problem with me. My problem is different. I am a fragment in a fragmented age." Despite this claim, the protagonist of Ran's unusual coming-of-age novel is defined by her precocious beauty and her struggle to define her sexual identity. Ran, one of China's most acclaimed contemporary women writers, tells how lovely Ni Niuniu is seduced before she enters puberty by an older woman, the sly, wise Widow Ho, then falls into an unwanted affair with her male teacher, Ti. In college, she meets the love of her life, a fellow student named Yin Nan, but their brief, passionate affair ends abruptly when Yin Nan becomes involved in the student protests in Tiananmen Square. Traumatized by the loss of Yin Nan and the deaths of her mother and Widow Ho, Niuniu retreats into her own mind, becoming Miss Nothing ("I no longer exist... I have disappeared..."). Niuniu's flaws, foibles and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study. Even the more conventional scenes are narrated with lyrical intensity, and hallucinatory dream sequences and passages describing Niuniu's alienation range from the revelatory to the overwrought. The result is an uneven but intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Chen Ran is the author of numerous short stories, which are available in the four-volume Collected Works of Chen Ran , and Bits and Pieces , a collection of essays. A Private Life is the first of her works to appear in English.
John Howard-Gibbon, a copy editor for China Daily in Beijing, has translated many works, notably Lao She's Teahouse . |
