Reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls12/11/2024
In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Han Kang of South Korea, which likely means that writers from East Asia will be overlooked for the next ten to twenty years. Haruki Murakami, born in 1949, will be nearing ninety if he manages to hold on that long. Whether he will live to see that day is uncertain—and even if he does, the prize may still elude him.
Reading Fortress Besieged — My Petty Mind11/09/2024
Having revisited Fortress Besieged, I find my petty suspicions growing ever more tenacious. It increasingly seems to me that the novel is nothing less than a faithful mirror of Qian Zhongshu’s own matrimonial life. And through writing it, he erected yet another wall—a Great Wall—around himself outside the besieged city, enclosing his soul so tightly he could no longer escape. Without a doubt, this so-called “pure fabrication,” as Yang Jiang once put it, has become inextricably bound to the author himself. One might say I have judged a gentleman with the heart of a scoundrel.
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