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Eileen Chang (1920–1995)

Forfatter af Love in a Fallen City

64+ Works 1,713 Members 36 Reviews 12 Favorited

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Værker af Eileen Chang

Love in a Fallen City (1999) 628 eksemplarer
Lust, Caution: The Story (1979) 189 eksemplarer
Half a Lifelong Romance (1951) 165 eksemplarer
Naked Earth (1954) 126 eksemplarer
Little Reunions (2009) 118 eksemplarer
Lust, Caution and Other Stories (2007) 94 eksemplarer
Written on Water (1968) 82 eksemplarer
The Rice Sprout Song (1955) 47 eksemplarer
Red Rose, White Rose (1600) 47 eksemplarer
The Rouge of the North (1967) 35 eksemplarer
The Golden Cangue (2000) 19 eksemplarer
Lust, Caution (2016) 18 eksemplarer
Traces of Love and Other Stories (1945) 11 eksemplarer
The Book of Change (2010) 10 eksemplarer
The Fall of the Pagoda (2010) 9 eksemplarer
紅樓夢魘 (1991) 8 eksemplarer
惘然記 (1991) 7 eksemplarer
對照記 : 看老照相簿 (1994) 7 eksemplarer
少帥 (2014) 3 eksemplarer
同學少年都不賤 (1991) 3 eksemplarer
續集 (1993) 3 eksemplarer
Time Tunnel: Stories and Essays (2021) 2 eksemplarer
色, 戒 (2007) 2 eksemplarer
沉香 (2005) 2 eksemplarer
張愛玲小說集 1 eksemplar
Ett halvt liv av kärlek (2019) 1 eksemplar
餘韻 1 eksemplar
The Golden Cangue 1 eksemplar
Deux brûle-parfums (2015) 1 eksemplar
傾城之戀 1 eksemplar
Tracce d'amore (2011) 1 eksemplar
重訪邊城 (2008) 1 eksemplar
张爱玲文集: 精读本 (2002) 1 eksemplar
張愛玲私語錄 (2010) 1 eksemplar
傳奇 1 eksemplar
传奇 增订本 1 eksemplar
張愛玲譯作選 (2010) 1 eksemplar

Associated Works

My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (2008) — Bidragyder — 760 eksemplarer
Lust, Caution [2007 film] (2007) — Forfatter — 70 eksemplarer
The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai (1992) — Oversætter, nogle udgaver56 eksemplarer

Satte nøgleord på

Almen Viden

Juridisk navn
張愛玲
Andre navne
Zhang Ying (birth)
张煐
Zhang Ailing
Fødselsdato
1920-09-30
Dødsdag
1995-09-08
Køn
female
Nationalitet
China (birth)
USA
Fødested
Shanghai, China
Dødssted
Westwood, California, USA
Bopæl
Shanghai, China
Los Angeles, California, USA
Hong Kong, China
Uddannelse
University of Hong Kong
Saint John's University, Shanghai
Saint Maria Girls' School
Erhverv
writer
novelist
translator
Organisationer
United States Information Service
Kort biografi
Eileen Chang [born Zhang Ying, renamed Zhang Ailing] (September 30, 1920 – September 8, 1995) was one of the most influential modern Chinese writers.

Chang is noted for her fiction writings that deal with the tensions between men and women in love, and are considered by some scholars to be among the best Chinese literature of the period. Chang's portrayal of life in 1940s Shanghai and Japanese-occupied Hong Kong is remarkable in its focus on everyday life and the absence of the political subtext which characterised many other writers of the period. The Taiwanese author Yuan Chiung-chiung drew inspiration from Chang. The poet and University of Southern California professor Dominic Cheung commented "had it not been for the political division between the Nationalist and Communist Chinese, she would have almost certainly won a Nobel Prize".

Eileen Chang in Wikipedia

Medlemmer

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I really hoped to like this but it seemed more like a soap opera than novel: boy meets girl, boy/girl fall in love, life repeatedly conspires to keep them apart. Although Chang wrote some of her works in English, she wrote this particular novel in Chinese and, sadly, I found the translation—although it read easily—a constant issue. The translator’s word choices and her syntax regularly made Chang’s writing appear stilted, a problem I have not had reading her works before. Worse, although the characters were well-drawn and believable, the situations were almost constantly melodramatic and only seemed to become more so as the book went on. According to the translator’s (useful) Introduction, this is “by almost any count, Eileen Chang’s most popular novel.” If so (and I have no reason to doubt it), I can only assume that the Chinese audience has wholly different expectations and reads the novel in a context that I simply cannot appreciate. Disappointing.… (mere)
 
Markeret
Gypsy_Boy | 7 andre anmeldelser | Feb 16, 2024 |
Eileen Chang's The Rouge of the North is actually the fourth iteration of a story that she wrote and re-wrote through her life. It was published first in 1943 in Chinese as The Golden Cangue; cangue being a sort of wooden pillory, used to penalise criminals in imperial China. The story had some success at the time; she subsequently translated into English and published it, and it can still be found (with difficulty) in anthologies of her stories. Much later, in 1967, not long after the death of her second husband and amid financial troubles, she substantially rewrote the same story in English as the The Rouge of the North, an expanded version of her well-received short story. It did not do well in English at the time, but a serialised Chinese version saw substantial success, sparking a brief revival of her career before a long, slow, lonely decline, both professionally and personally. I learned much about this process of writing and rewriting from a detailed introductory essay by David Der-Wei Wang in this Harvard University Press edition of the English version of The Rouge of the North, although looking back, I wish I had read the novel first and the essay after because it undoubtedly shaped my understanding of the book. With that said, I think for non-Chinese readers like myself, the essay is vital, because this is a story full of complex allusion and metaphor, and would have been much harder to appreciate without the context and explanations he provides.

The Rouge of the North traces the life of Yindi, a beautiful woman, born into an impoverished family. Living with her brother and sister-in-law, and their children, she sells sesame oil, and resists, enraged, the overtures of local men, who come by the shop to tease the 'Sesame Oil Beauty'. Although she harbours an interest in the quiet, reclusive pharmacist's assistant who works across the road, she recognises his utter lack of ambition does not match her own desires for a better, richer life. She accordingly accepts a proposal from a wealthy, aristocratic family to marry their second son, described to her as a blind man, but kind and gentle. On marriage, of course, she discovers that she has wedded an invalid, addicted to opium and in no way a suitable partner, and the life of wealth and comfort she had imagined is instead a cold, dispiriting prison from which she can't escape. A southerner in a northern family, a poor girl amidst rich people, her marriage is a series of humiliations, to which she reacts by becoming increasingly selfish, arrogant, and rebellious. Desperate for romantic love, which her husband cannot fulfill, she embarks on a doomed affair with one of her brothers-in-law; he in turn, ultimately rejects her. Through the story, we see her ire directed towards the matriarch of the house, her mother-in-law, who holds the keys to her fate. As the novel progresses, Yindi slowly becomes the woman she despises: the family's wealth crumbling, her unhappiness spiraling. Towards the end of the book, she is matriarch of a small household, respected but not loved, deferred to, but friendless, and defined by her strict adherence to the customs and traditions that she once strained against. Sitting on her bed, she drifts back into memories of being a young unmarried girl, fending off suitors at the sesame oil shop. "Everything she drew comfort from was gone, had never happened. Nothing much had happened to her yet."

In David Der-Wei Weng's preface to this story of Yindi's spiraling decline, he asks what we are to make of the way Chang wrote, and rewrote, and wrote again the same story, over and over, wrestling with ideas of female agency and victimization, of the way in which women sought to reach for power within constrained domestic spheres. It's too facile, he argues, to suggest that she is, through this story, reshaping and retelling her own life's story in different ways. Rather, he looks at the way she didn't just write and rewrite, but also how she moved between two languages, creating and recreating the same story (translation does not seem to be an appropriate word here) to create a more realistic account. Weng writes that the character of Yindi goes from the first version of the story to the last in progression, changing from "...a tragic monster into a desolate woman." As I have only read one of four versions, I can't confirm: but in The Rouge of the North, Chang writes almost dispassionately, recording Yindi's eventual ensnaring into the traditions she tried unsuccessfully to escape. As Weng put it, "She wants to find her own man and is rewarded by a living dead man; she is torn by adulterous desires in her younger days only to settle into her widowed life with formidable stoicism; she seeks to end her life in the middle of the novel, but outlives all the other major characters. Shuttling between the possibilities and impossibilities of her life, Yindi is never what she appears or wants to be; her transgressive desires continually throw her back into the closure of repetition."

Even though this is a short novel, really a novella, it is a challenging read because each sentence is carefully crafted, and I'm not surprised it took me most of the month to get through this carefully. For all that Yindi is increasingly unlikeable, it is difficult not to feel your heart break for her, or to be transported by Chang's very evocative account of her life.
… (mere)
3 stem
Markeret
rv1988 | Feb 1, 2024 |
My first book by her. I think I'll have to try another. Interesting story but just not enough meat there for me. Time to find another one and see how it goes. (Ang Lee's film of her short story "Lust, Caution," however, is brilliant!)
 
Markeret
Gypsy_Boy | Aug 26, 2023 |

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Statistikker

Værker
64
Also by
3
Medlemmer
1,713
Popularitet
#14,989
Vurdering
½ 3.7
Anmeldelser
36
ISBN
190
Sprog
12
Udvalgt
12

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