The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 3: The Warning Voice

The Story of the Stone #3

by Cao Xueqin, David Hawkes (Translator)

"The Story of the Stone (c. 1760)", also known by the title of "The Dream of the Red Chamber", is the great novel of manners in Chinese literature. Divided into five volumes, of which "The Warning Voice" is the third, it charts the glory and decline of the illustrious Jia family (a story which closely accords with the fortunes of the author's own family). The two main characters, Bao-yu and Dai-yu, are set against a rich tapestry of humour, realistic detail and delicate poetry, which accurately reflects the ritualized hurly-burly of Chinese family life. But over and above the novel hangs the constant reminder that there is another plane of existence - a theme which affirms the Buddhist belief in a supernatural scheme of things.

Genres: China, Fiction, Classics, Chinese Literature, Literature, 18th Century, Historical Fiction

640 pages, Paperback

First published January 3, 1791

About the author

Xueqin Cao (Chinese: 曹雪芹; pinyin: Cáo Xuěqín; Wade–Giles: Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in, 1715 or 1724 — 1763 or 1764) was the pseudonym of a Qing Dynasty Chinese writer, best known as the author of Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.
It has been suggested that his given name was Zhan Cao (曹霑) and his courtesy name is Mengruan (夢阮; 梦阮; literally "Dream about Ruan" or "Dream of Ruan")[...]

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a change from the last two volumes. In many ways it feels like it comes off the rails, as more and more time gets spent on digressions and the love triangle that's ostensibly at the heart of the plot fades to nothingness. The poetry also all but disappears and gets replaced by high melodrama and a creeping sense of doom. "The beast with a thousand legs is a long time dying," but by Chapter 80 everyone in the household can see the end. It might seem like so many changes to something already perfect would cause the quality to drop, but the growing sense of emptiness and decay produces some of the most beautiful moments of the entire novel so far: the lonely Mid-Autumn Festival, Bao-yu's elegy for Skybright, the flower cards, and of course the long, long saga of Er-jie and San-jie which explodes into the quiet lives of the Jias to reveal just how bad things have been allowed to get. Almost no one makes it out of this book unaltered except, maybe, Dai-yu, but as the last few chapters make clear her fate as well is closing in on her. Despite minor continuity errors and some strange pacing, the writing in this volume is some of Cao Xueqin's finest. If the lost 40 chapters had never been "found," I would say that what we have by the end of the volume would both be enough to make most of the rest of the plot clear, and to confirm The Story of the Stone as an awe-inspiring, life-changing work of art.

[Meeg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so addictive. I don't want to say goodbye to the characters.

[Fin · Rating 5 out of 5]

And this being the season of autumn when the power of metal predominates and the White God is master of the earth, the signs themselves are melancholy. I wake from dreams of her on a lonely couch and in an empty room. As the moon veils herself behind the trees of the garden, the moonlight and the sweet form I dreamed of are in the same moment extinguished; as the perfume fades from the hangings of my bedchamber, the laboured breath and whispered words I strove to catch at the same time fall silent. Dew pearls the pavement's moss; the launderer's beat is borne in unceasingly through my casement. Rain wets the wall-fig; a flute's complaint carries uncertainly from a near-by courtyard.

Her sweet name is not extinguished, for the parrot in his cage under the eaves ceases not to repeat it; and the crabtree in my courtyard whose half-withering was a foretokening of her fate stands yet her memorial. But no more shall the sound of her lotus feet betray her at hide-and-seek behind the screen; no more will her fingers cull budding orchids for the game of match-my-flower in the garden. The embroidery silks are thrown aside in a tangle: never again will she cut them with her silver scissors. The sheeny silk lies creased and crumpled: never again shall her hot-iron smooth out its perfumed folds.

OK so 1500~ pages in and it's finally starting to go wrong for the Jia family now. This quote is part of Bao-yu's lovely invocation to his departed maid skybright, and indeed the whole book is full of harddoneby dead or exiled maids, irreparably broken marriages, declining families and moments of crisis. Sighs and footsteps are heard in the dead of night from the Hall of Ancestors, ghosts of wronged girls are hallucinated endlessly, and plaintive flute music hits just a little too real to have soundtracking our moonlit parties now....

That doesn't stop Cao Xueqin from also filling this volume with reams of lovely poetry, drinking games that sound like great fun, and ridiculous hijinks aplenty - this novel remains a sheer delight to read in its sumptuous detail and langurous pacing. But this can also make the inevitable downturns quite shocking when they do come. Jia Lian's secret marriage to Er-jie and Xiang-lian's broken engagement to San-jie are two absolutely insane stories, and San-jie's sudden and dramatic suicide-by-sword had me jaw agaped for pages at a time.

Still love Xi-Feng (though she does some fucked up shit in this book I kinda get it given how horrible her husband is), love Bao yu evermore, looove Dai yu now - the Lana Del Rey of the Qing dynasty in all her "decadent melancholy" (as the nun Adamantina criticises her poetic sensibilities), feeel v bad for sunset and skybright, hate lady wang and you-shi, despise every male family member and wish them to be eunuchised(not a word) etcetc.

Some other cool stuff: explicit queer relationships between two young actress girls (nenuphar and etamine ((Hawkes is so good at names lol))), lots of gender bending in the form of Parfumee-Aventurin, the insane impossible geography of Prospect Garden (not an Eden, too much of a space of transgression, but certainly a kind of free paradise) and its endless pavilions and lakes and crannies; and the reappearance of the mad bobdylanesque Taoist to take Xiang-lian away after san-jie's death!! This novel is crazy dude.

((Also David Hawkes' translation (or 'recreation' might be more accurate) is a feat to behold- excellent poetic sense, incredibly deft characterisation, a witty and empathetic tone - this might be the most impressive translation I've ever read. I imagine reading this novel and its attendant poetry in Chinese is very different, in which case I'm happy to call Hawkes a writer of incredible talent and achievement based on this work alone. ))

Your own self, not the East Wind, is your undoing.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found The Crab-Flower Club a little slow in comparison with the first volume of The Story of the Stone. Volume 3, The Warning Voice, is more eventful and compelling. The profusion of domestic incidents allow Cao Xueqin to demonstrate his wonderfully keen eye for personalities and how they clash. There is something curiously timeless about a household struggling to get along as their financial situation deteriorates. The Jia family's expenses exceed their income and this is starting to cause problems. Several younger female characters step up to household management roles and attempt cost-saving measures. However these are always contested and difficult to impose, as no-one wants to sacrifice their comforts or spheres of influence. The complex web of relationships between the extended family and their servants is fascinating to observe. Bao-yu doesn't have a particularly strong presence in this volume, which largely follows the women who run the household both on the senior management and shop floor levels, as it were. Throughout the novel so far the narrative has been equally interested in the aristocratic Jia family and their servants.

There are fewer big celebrations in The Warning Voice than The Crab-Flower Club, firstly because of a family bereavement that puts everyone in mourning for a long period and secondly due to money. The family resort repeatedly to pawning treasures in order to pay for parties, which is clearly not sustainable. The servants are the ones who actually do the pawning, so are keenly aware of what's going on. Amid these financial problems and the domestic turbulence they cause, one plot thread really stands out. Xi-feng, a woman whose strength of character you have to admire while also being terrified of her, discovers that her husband has secretly married a second wife when he should have been in mourning. Her actions upon discovering this are impressively machiavellian, albeit merciless towards the unfortunate second wife. Events proceed in a positively operatic fashion, culminating in a tragic denouement.

Indeed, all the marriages that happen in this volume turn out very badly. I don't think I've spotted a good husband yet in The Story of the Stone. They are all feckless gamblers, cruel abusers, paranoid obsessives, or some combination of the three. Bao-yu is accused of being effeminate and spending all his time with maids, but his options for male companionship are pretty terrible. By contrast, his female cousins and maids are witty, intelligent, and artistic.

There is an ominous sense of things starting to go downhill for the Jia family in this halfway point of the five-volume novel. While the second volume is full of voluptuous material luxury and sumptuous parties, here tragedy, instability, and the need to control expenditure creep in. Now that I'm pretty familiar with the huge cast of characters, I find The Story of the Stone highly readable as well as fascinating. It is an extraordinarily intricate family drama, set in a historical milieu evoked in exquisitely vivid detail. I do not wonder at it remaining a classic for centuries. Finally, the translator must be commended both for the fluid style and reconciliation of the contradictions between multiple surviving manuscripts, a process carefully described in the appendices.

[nostalgebraist nostalgebraist · Rating 3 out of 5]

After greatly enjoying Volume 2, I found this long middle volume a bit of a slog.

I can't tell how much of this is due to any intrinsic difference (after all, the 5-volume division was made by the translator, not the author) and how much of it is due to the fact that I have a finite, if large, patience for this kind of story. In my review of Vol. 2 I made a big deal out of how formless the plot is -- sometimes dramatic, sometimes very mundane for long stretches, never following predictable "arc" structures -- and how this struck me as enjoyably lifelike. Vol. 3 is, if anything, more extreme in this regard. In particular, it focuses more than the earlier volumes on a wide array of "minor" characters, to the point that the putative main characters disappear for long stretches. There is a thin line between the sublime "lifelikeness" I praised in Vol. 2 and just being really really boring, and a lot of Vol. 3 crossed that line for me.

That said, there is a stretch near the middle of the book -- the story of the You sisters -- that is atypically exciting and dramatic, and I found myself racing through it. This section ends with the appearance of a character, "the lame Taoist," who had originally appeared way back in Vol. 1 when the story involved more supernatural elements, and the translator comments that in fact this entire section might have been spliced in from another more dramatic, more supernatural novel which Xueqin never finished or showed to the world. I found this quite disappointing; it made me feel as though I had been reading something haphazardly made, which expressed no unified artistic vision but instead just consisted of a bunch of disparate pieces slapped together. This feeling is of course only worsened by the fact that Xueqin himself did not finish the novel -- the sections definitely written by him end with Vol. 3, and Vols. 4-5 are thought to be written at least in part by someone else.

What is this thing I have been reading for several years now? It has been called the greatest work of Chinese literature. Mao Zedong claimed to have read it 25 times and recommended that others read it 5 times (it is 2500 pages long!). It has beautiful and hilarious moments, incredibly dull stretches, a strange and problematic structure and textual history. It definitely doesn't have fit the model I have in mind for a "great work." But I am determined to see it through to the end, in part because I have no idea where it could possibly be going. On to Vol. 4.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Things are starting to go badly for the kids at the Garden of Green (actually it transpires, Red, but the translator thought this implied other things in english) Delights. Especially struck here by how the female characters - servants and aristos both - are often abruptly turned from people who we learn much about, who do their best to survive and advance in a world where they have fundamentally no rights whatsoever, into mere property: sold off, sometimes just killed. The ability of both major and minor characters to break out into improvised but highly precise verse remains formidable.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where to start? Volume 2 was as good as it was going to get in terms of consistency, character and plotting. Although Volume 3 often feels like it is falling apart despite the editors’ (Rouge Inkstone, Odd Tablet, translator David Hawkes) best efforts. Still, I continue to rate this five stars and place it on par with earlier volumes. The first reason is for the author’s audacity to introduce a whole slew of new characters midway through the overall story and sidelining major characters such as Xi-feng, Grandmother, Lady Wang, Jia Zheng. The novel, in keeping with its subject, this massive family, cannot help itself from expanding until it breaks. This greatly enhances the reader’s vicarious experience.

After Xi-feng’s miscarriage and with all responsible adults away at the Dowager Consort’s funeral, the inhabitants of the Prospect Garden have nothing holding them back from constant bickering (at best), culminating in an all-out throwdown between Aunt Zhao and the former actresses. I love how no one can decide what the actresses should be following the dissolution of the troupe for financial reasons. Are they pets, or are they indentured servants with zero abilities? The situation brings out the worst in everybody, from the cook to Aunt Zhao (and much later, Lady Wang) to Xi-feng who, from her convalescent bed, wants to torture the maids by making them kneel on broken dishes in the hot sun! Although this cluster of chapters is brilliantly humorous in its depiction of a comedy of bad manners, one ultimately senses without being told that the cracks are beginning to show in this small society’s basic structure. However, we still subscribe to the notions of respect for elders, how feudalism works and why it often doesn’t, and how the conflicts among the upper strata of the family are often enacted among their inferiors (particularly anyone in contact with Xi-feng). We remain aware of the severe limitations of women, such as the isolation of the concubine sister (and Bao-yu’s continuing transgressive gender role, as he is the only male allowed to see her face to face). By the end of this volume marriage matches are being made and play out horribly.

The second reason that I give this five stars is for the multi-chapter story arcs, involving either fighting while the responsible adults are away, or the saga of Er-jie and San-jie, or the fallout from the naughty embroidery. This expansive quality reminded me of dramatic television when a show decides to throw side characters into the spotlight for an episode. These also make me excited to watch the 1987 CCTV series as soon as I finish volume 5. However, in focusing on new characters I lost the sense of our main characters on the periphery. In previous volumes, a chapter might have very little to do with Bao-yu or Dai-yu, but their relatives and maids play out their relationship by talking about their masters. In previous volumes we were always aware of Aroma and Precious because the popped up in every other scene according to circumstance. The chapters are now less meandering but also less rich in character detail. This makes me fear for volumes 4 & 5, not written by Cao Xueqin himself, though probably from his notes and fragments.

Less parties seem to be thrown, the exception being the lavish dinners for Cousin Zhen’s archery parties. I cannot tell whether this is only because of the family’s imposed mourning, or if they really understand they need to stop. Every chapter seems to have the selling of more possessions, whereas in volume 2 every scene involved throwing a party. If anyone embodies this volume’s titular warning voice, it is Tan-chun who says to Xi-feng: “No doubt our time too is coming, slowly but surely. A great household like ours is not destroyed in a day. The beast with a thousand legs is a long time dying.” In order for the destruction to be complete, it has to begin from within. Tan-chun has emerged as one of my favorite characters. Basically I love anyone with any common sense, so I put her up there with Aroma, Bao-chai, Adamantina, and to a lesser extent Patience. Probably my favorite scene (there are so many!) is when Tan-chun stands up to Xi-feng and her marauders Zhou Rui’s wife and Wang Shan-bao’s wife when they search all the young maid’s belongings. However, if the author wants me to love Tan-chun, it probably means something bad will befall her. They do often say that it is a pity she was born to the wrong mother.

It is quite sad to see Bao-yu become increasingly lonely as the garden slowly de-populates; “Five more decent people were lost to the world,” he observes after Ying-chun and four maids move to the Sun household. It is a telling remark about how utopian the garden had been just two years ago, coupled with his other observation that unmarried girls are good and married women become horrible or receive horrors. To illustrate his point, his mother sacks several maids and actresses, another preview of future calamities. Although it is quite painful to see certain maids dispatched, it is worth it for the long discussion between Bao-yu and Aroma afterwards. They have such a great chemistry and I don’t believe we’ve had a major scene with them at all in this volume.

Bao-chai continues to interest me: she is incredibly respectful of social mores and often is the voice of propriety. Her mind is like a steel trap so she appears to know everything. Yet she often has difficulty when others are emotional, especially when they are rightly so. Bao-chai will tell them they are not being rational, or she will spout off some maxim that she thinks should correct the situation.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

In an ironic twist, I've come to realize that the advice I've been giving to an increasing number of students as the term progresses should be well applied to myself. In other words, physician, heal thyself, in my case meaning reader, modulate so that what is read brings actual joy (crediting Kondo for this one), especially if the work obligations are rising and the for fun reading isn't much a race with the deadline at the end of 2019. As such, I will be taking an extended break before tackling Volume 4 of this work, as this volume was a particularly length, dramatic, and ultimately emotionally draining volume, to the point that my rating despite my admiration and growing attachment to various characters. This world, for all its wealthy red chambers, is a brutal one, and my desire for Bao-Yu to face a tad more hardship and thus mature at a faster pace was fulfilled right when I had to started to like the boy and, more importantly, the bevy of girl characters around him, a number of whom were seemingly fleshed out during the course of this tome just to be struck down all the more tragically. That, and the confusion during certain sectors, which the appendices makes apparent can never be truly resolved short of bringing Cao Xueqin back from the grave, is frustrating, to say the least, and my knowledge that this mix of successive editing choices and translator choices and theoretical choices and the ultimate blockage that is the gap between Mandarin Chinese and English will only worsen in the final two volumes made me commit to taking a break and not continuing until I truly want to. I'm glad to be finding this work to be, for all its incongruous medley and ill fitting story threads, as increasingly accessible, understandable, and engaging as it is, but for now, I need a breather.

A lot went down in 600 pages, most notably secret wives, funerary rituals, major downfall of reputable peers, dramatic suicides by various means, cloistering, raids conducted against salacious materials, and other dramatic events that are, due to their domestic location, a peculiar mixture of highly officiated and deeply personal. Perhaps I would be more used to this if I didn't avoid soap operas like the plague (I tried a few historical fiction dramas that could fit into this category, but the Borgias one just ended up boring me with all the heterosexual sex scenes after a while), but I do, so. Anyway, as previously said, Bao Yu is beginning to realize on a permanent level the cruelty bound up in his family's patriarchal stability, and now that the Crab Flower Club of the previous volume is all but disbanded, it feels the main character's maturation is coinciding, in a much more painful manner than I anticipated or even hoped for, with the steadily waning fortunes of the Jia family, judging by the ever present plaints about poor harvests and smaller congregations of family members for various celebratory functions. More characters were fleshed out, and I could probably pick out a relation in the crowd after so much time spent keeping half an eye on the family table of contents and various trees while reading the text. However, reading this grew wearisome, especially when volume four was the promised destination once this was through. I don't like the idea of compromising my idea through sheer recalcitrance, so until my enthusiasm I'll be putting Bao Yu's journey into adulthood on hold. It may end up being a longer break than I imagine, but as this is the second month of the year that I have to read one of the longest novel's in existence, I feel I can cut myself some slack.

I've been saying goodbye to favorite students of mine lately, some of them unfortunately leaving my place of work far more stressed than when they came in. It worries me, and while I can't do much for them beyond demanding they treat themselves better than they have been and surround themselves with others who care about them as a person and not as a financial investment, oftentimes via slowing or even stopping certain activities they had been pursuing, I can at least take my own advice. It's rather disappointing that TSotS is giving me so much more trouble than did Journey to the West, but I feel, with the latter, I was more patient with myself when it came to taking my time, or at any rate I wasn't lulled into a false sense of security by 18th century translated Mandarin instead of 15th/16th century translated Mandarin and actual plot and character development rather than endless repetition of slightly shifting tropes and monsters of the week. In any case, I've made my decision, so Xueqin will have to wait after this till the stars align a tad less stressfully than they are currently doing. Unfortunate as it is, I have to look out for myself first; reading, second.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The following review is my review for all five volumes as a whole.

I'm going to put forth an argument that books can be compared to relationships. There are books that are guilty pleasures with no literary value beyond straightforward entertainment, such as potboiler mysteries or the much maligned Harlequin style romance. These are your one-night stands of the book world.

Then there are brief forays readers take out of curiosity or biblio-style peer pressure, such as best-seller lists or perceived literary acclaim. Examples of this could be a summer spent reading Swedish detective fiction, or reading the latest Young Adult series (Hunger Games Trilogy, perhaps) or whatever Oprah's new favorite thing is. These would be your "flings" or summer romances. They are short term pleasures which you may outgrow or simply move on from after finishing.

And then you have a book like "The Story of the Stone." This is a long term relationship. It sucks up your soul and being, and perhaps becomes a part of you. It is impossible to start another book after this without giving yourself time to process the experience, at least it was the case for me. When the final page of this journey is turned, you are physically and maybe even emotionally drained.

The Jia family, with whom you get to spend 2500 pages with, becomes an extended family of your own. At the core is Jia Bao Yu, a spoiled somewhat effeminate boy, who is more than just a boy. He is the human incarnation of a rock fashioned by a goddess in her efforts to repair the sky, but is never used. Left alone for eons, this stone begins to ponder the purpose of existence until it is given a chance to live as a human.

The story proper begins when Bao Yu is around 13. He is a member of a wealthy family who spends his days wiling away his time with his numerous girl cousins, maids and even a Buddhist nun. The narrative follows the daily life of his extensive family, their staff, and many hangers-on. An astounding number of characters make up the cast, from the 80 year old Lady Dowager who is the matriarch of the family, down to her great-granddaughter Qaio-Jie, but the amazing thing is the author's ability to make each of the many characters feel fully human and real, with hopes, desires, , talents and weaknesses of all their own.

As can be expected with such an immense novel, the narrative structure is complex. It is often episodic, bouncing around from one plot line to another. The main plot line concerns Bao Yu and the question of which of his two girl cousins he'll marry, the ethereal Dai Lin or the ideally modest and respectable Bao Chai. Surrounding this love triangle are the various soap operatic endeavors of the many family members, and surrounding the family dramatics is the decline of the family fortune and its rapidly growing debts. And above all of these worldly concerns is a spiritual and philosophical exploration from the Buddhist and Taoist point of view all of life is a fleeting illusion.

Ironically, despite the novel's length, it can be considered an unfinished or incomplete masterpiece. The original novel was never published in the author's lifetime. For thirty years the novel consisted of the first 80 existing chapters being passed around in manuscript form. The first printed edition, which came out in the 1790s was published with 120 chapters, with the editors claiming to have pieced together the remaining 40 chapters from fragments and the author's notes. The first 80 chapters make up the first three volumes of this translation, and the remaining 40 chapters make up the final two volumes. I'll leave the question of authorship of the final 40 chapters to the scholars. Whether it is different authors, or (as the translators suggest) perhaps the author died before revising the final 40 chapters, there is a decided difference between the two sections.

The first section is chock full of poetry and character driven narrative, while the second section is plot-driven, workmanlike and flat, as if there is a stated goal in wrapping up all of the loose plot lines in as tidy a manner as possible. The difference between the two sections is accentuated by the fact that one translator worked on the first 80 chapters, and another translator worked on the final 40 chapters. While there is a difference in translating styles, nothing is diminished from the impact of the book. It is a big commitment to read this book, but one well worth the experience. Bao Yu and his family will linger for a long time in my imagination.

[Taro · Rating 5 out of 5]

More money troubles than last volume, it gets so bad that Grandma Jia's guest had to be served regular rice for her congee.
The Garden, in which only the cousins (and their maids) live, has been re-created in 1984 in Beijing, initially as a movie set but now as a tourist attraction, exquisitely detailed, at 13 hectares. There's about two dozen people living in an area where my neighbourhood would have 3000. It's got a lake, deer, a crane, rice fields, numerous groves..... And this is a small wing of Jia Family Mansion Rong-Guo House. The Mansion Complex has roads, accountants, official buyers and literally countless servants (many of them slaves). Grandmother Jia has an entire storage archive for her own personal affects with a full-time clerk. I'd like to see Gail Vaz-Oxlade do a special with this family and see where they could cut costs.
The Family's holdings are drying up, tenants are paying less regular rent, rough harvests are cutting sales; You can really feel the family on decrescendo from its illustrious past- and very much relatable to how I've seen my world of the past decade~ish. Watching services cut from businesses I worked for, seeing the decline, the employees, even long-time employees cut, left to the elements, not-our-problem anymore. While the top just can't grasp that things are getting worse and they can't maintain their own standard of living indefinitely.... Everyone shields Grandmother Jia from the financial realities of the house but she knows, and she can't bear the loss of "Face".
We also learn more about the conjugal relationships with the men, their wives, and concubines; though I am having some difficulty grasping the timeline.

As Bao-Yu, The JADE, grows up the girls he grew up with are separating, his glorious autumn of the last volume is now a memory. He's scared himself to move on to Manly Adulthood, and you can see, he's not ready to look at it. Even Lin Dai-yu will move out of the garden one day. He's meeting with his male cousins more than before, but even his mother and grandmother do agree together that he's much better with his friends in the garden and .. should have been born a girl. Regardless of intercultural concepts translation, I still see Bao Yu at least as a queer character.

It's quite endearing and quite funny, but you can see major holes in the fabric of the family's wealth and glory, the unravelling is hard to dismiss.

Kudos again to David Hawkes, especially for finding "Pernoctate" when trying to translate a rigid structure poem with many layers of culturally specific allusions.

Here's a floorplan for the Rong-Guo compound, the Garden is in the top corner. Recall that I share that space with 3000 people.
Bao-Yu's house is in the bottom right little panhandle corner of the garden, 怡紅院

And omg someone recreated it in the Sims

It's interesting to note that Bao-Yu's house 怡紅院 means, very roughly, "Joyous Red Court", but Red as a colour in Chinese culture brings up many images of prosperity and auspiciousness. Its notable that Hawkes went with calling it "Green Delights", perhaps using "Green" as an allusion to the nature of the garden, or as well to the western though of green=money, relating a bit more to his audience; and I think it may have been to avoid the allusion to the alternative English title "Dream of the Red Chamber", since he titled this translation "Story of the Stone" (the Chinese title is the former). The "Red Chamber" title is definitely supposed to refer to both Bao-Yu's residence itself; and the mansions of the Rong-Guo complex and auspiciously decorated homes of the wealthy, though "Dream" and "Chamber" are rough approximations of what the reader should understand, and Hawkes mentioned this part in the first volume.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contrary to the modern view that the duty of literature is be literary, I always hope that literature will be educational. In this regard the Story of the Stone which is one of the so-called "Four Chinese Classics" is paying off in Spades.

Volume Three helped throw considerable light on my childhood experiences as a coin collector. I recall entering a coin shop at nine years of age with my father as an escort. In a bin, I came across at tattered paper bill with Chinese characters, a sour looking mandarin and the following inscription in English: "One million Hell Dollars." "What is this?", I asked the clerk.

"That is not real. The Chinese put this hell money in the coffins so their relatives will money to spend when they are in the afterlife," answered the clerk.

"I collect coins not bills," I said and threw the note back.

"It sounds to me like a cock and bull story," said my father who retrieved the note from the bin and bought it for a nickel so we could tell Mother the story. This item is still in my collection.

In the third volume the Story of the Stone, the Hell money appears. Our hero Bao-Yu has several notes burned as a prank to the consternation of some of his cousins. His mother approves heartily: "Good. I am glad you burned it," she affirms. "This spirit script is a bad modern idea. You won't find any mention of it in Confucious."

Thus I learned that the clerk in the coin had told me a story that was at least partially accurate. Moreover, I discovered that my father's disdainful view of Hell money was consistent with that of the fictitious Chinese noblewoman of the 18th century.

Volume three also contains a delightful passage of a Chinese acupuncturist whose dirt and physical appearance make another Noblewoman decide not to let the hag treat her husband. Instead a real physician is summoned.

The moments of humour are infrequent in Volume Three, however. The Proustian lament for the beauties of a bygone era also over. Volume III, is very much like Zhang Yimou's film "Raise the Red Lantern" which won many prizes at festivals in the early 1990s. Volume Three is a horrifying tale of the nasty manner in which the pecking order is established and maintained in the Wang-Jia clan. The hens are nasty even by the standards of the Red Lantern. In the course of the novel four concubines and secondary wives die either through gross abuse or suicide. Servants are beaten and physical fights break out frequently.

While this goes on the men show themselves at their worst. They acquire concubines and junior wives for their pleasure and then do nothing to protect them from the gory retribution. I am dreading to see what will come in Volume 4.

[Zachary Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Thank the Lord for that!' said Bao-yu fervently. 'If only she could shake it off altogether!'

Nightingale looked up at him with amusement:
'It's not often we hear you calling on the Lord.'

Bao-yu returned her smile:
'Any doctor will do in an emergency.'

Man oh man, this is one bittersweet book, folks. It's the sunset of an era for the Jia family, and everyone and their dog knows it. Dai-yu, Bao-yu, Xi-feng, and nearly half of the characters are either sick or depressed. Anything not nailed down is being pawned off out the yinyang. Prospect Garden empties out its beautiful girls. Hell-- things are so bad, the servants can't even keep the damn gates locked at night. As Xi-feng bemoans when trying to bean-count the family's way out of bankruptcy, the Jias are slaves to their own past good fortunes and it's about time that the chickens come home to roost.

To be frank, it doesn't have the spellbinding whimsy of the The Golden Days, or the splendorous atmosphere of The Crab-Flower Club. What The Warning Voice does have, however, is a helluva mood. True to its spirit of Taoism, the characters are liberated by their own true natures, and entrapped by spider webs of their own design:

In the first half, the girls of Prospect Garden explore their talents, their ambitions, and even their sexualities and genders. One girl pretends to be the wife of another girl until it feels real, while one of Bao-yu's servants begins to adopt a male persona. And both are treated with such wonder, sensitivity, and total lack of sensationalism that it sneaks up on you. But all it takes is some jealous and irrational busybodies, and next thing you know -- Bao-yu is wandering an empty garden.

I wanted to yell at this book for how it puts these people, who I feel like I've known since they were boys and girls, through terrible misery. At the center of the impending disasters is Dai-yu, because like a flower, she is blooming into something beautiful -- and also very, very, very, very not long for this world. Bao-yu, meanwhile, is shaping up to be quite a sensitive, smart, and caring man...just in time to wave goodbye to her.

The most bittersweet thing of it all is knowing there's two more volumes, and things must get worse before they get better. And it's bittersweet to move on without David Hawkes as the trusty translator, my companion through this foreign world (I sure hope the next volume explains why he stopped, because half the joy is cross-referencing his translation with the Chinese, and appreciating Hawkes's good sense and creativity). But I've gone this far -- it's a crime to not follow Cao Xueqin and his jade-boy Bao-yu to wherever in Heaven or on Earth they're heading.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memorable moments from Vol. 3: Grandma Jia gives her speech about how songs aren't realistic because the young girls only have one maid. Xifeng becomes ill and the girls take over. The garden is divided up. 200 pages of mostly maids' stories. The singers are assigned as maids, love affairs, and cross dressing ensues. Baoyu has his birthday party where everyone gets drunk, Zheng dies and the story of Jie Er and Jie San. Interesting to see that it is only after Xifeng's miscarriage that her husband goes off in search of this "2nd wife". Hawkes mentions how the story of jie san seems thrown in from a different story about the monk with the magic mirror and messes up the chronology of the er jie story. Still it was interesting this time to get that the person she was in love with was the straight opera singer who'd beaten up Huan. I think he kinda deserved such misery. It's interesting to see how after this despite her best efforts, Xifeng starts to loose some of her credibility and power within the households. Whether this is due to the new concubines, the death of erjie or the fact that she was ill for so long after her miscarriage is hard to say. Time seems to be going quite quickly in this book, and on page 400 it's already "over a year" since the last meeting of the poetry club. I wish I could find a list of what was supposed to happen when and how old everyone is supposed to be as it can be quite confusing. The last part of the book looks has Grandmother Jia's 80th birthday, and the Moon Festival, Dai Yu and Xiang yun composing poetry was great. I also loved how fiesty Tan Chun got towards the end. And I have to say I really enjoyed Bao-Yu's elegy for "Skybright". Xue pan and his wife were amusing, I realised that xue pan is so the normal leading character of novels, (such as jin ping mei) but here he is gently ridiculed for his behaviour instead. It seemed like things were slowly starting to unravel and everyone was growing up and dying. The families were starting to become seperated and money was becoming more of an issue, and as Xifeng became less powerful the servants gained more freedom to cause trouble. It is a shame that the next 40 chapters were not successfully kept. But will start the next volume of this translation now.

[Edo Schoone · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a lot more intrige, the poetry of the second volume is almost completely left behind. While the first half was a bit difficult to get through because of the big number of small confrontations between maids/elders etc., it did flesh out a lot of smaller characters, who started meeting their ends in the second half. The decline of the great family has certainly been set into motion, which makes me very curious to read the last two volumes.

[Helmut · Rating 5 out of 5]

Die warnende Stimme

Nachdem man bisher 60 Kapitel lang die Geschicke der Jia-Cousins hat verfolgen können, gibt es in diesem Band eine zumindest mir sehr willkommene Abwechslung von den langsam etwas ausgeleierten gegenseitigen Besuchen und Festen: Jia Lians heimliche Affäre mit Er-jie. Interessant sind dabei insbesondere die Anmerkungen des Übersetzers über die Textprobleme, die an dieser Stelle auftreten - das Verschmelzen eines älteren Textfragments in die bestehende Erzählung, was nicht wirklich geglückt ist.

Besonders gefallen hat mir in diesem Band aber Kapitel 56; die Beschreibung eines Traums Bao-yus baut auf einem typisch chinesischen Topos auf (der Traum innerhalb eines Traums) und ist sehr gut durchgeführt.

Ansonsten fällt auf, wie die in den vorherigen Bänden geschilderte Feierlaune nun oft durch Streitereien innerhalb des Haushalts durchbrochen wird. Der gezeigte Neid, die allgegenwärtige Mißgunst und Vetternwirtschaft bringt erste Sprünge in die bisher so makellose Vase. Immer öfter wird auf die Finanzprobleme der über ihre Verhältnisse lebenden Familie hingewiesen, und man ahnt nun langsam, dass die ganze Geschichte nicht gut enden wird.

Aufmachung ist identisch zu den ersten beiden Bänden; sehr hilfreiche und kluge Anhänge, die diesmal auf einige Eigenheiten des Textes bezüglich Nebenpersonen eingehen, und die immer noch unverzichtbaren Stammbäume vervollständigen die gelungene Präsentation.

[Connie Kronlokken]

Warning voice indeed! This volume is full of discussion of money. The family must pawn things, and they begin to talk of having fewer servants. Bao-yu loses Skybright to innuendo. Xi-feng is horrified to find her husband has taken a secret wife. Chaos and infighting upset everyone, though there are several lovely holiday scenes, such as the mid-Autumn moon-viewing festival, and some poetry writing.

I discuss the book further on my blog, as an example of a thoroughly un-Western paradigm:

http://soareyoutomythoughts.blogspot....

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Warning Voice is a good title for this third volume, which starts with a growing sense of foreboding and ends with more and more members of the extended Jia clan in unhappy circumstances. The volume retains some of the comedy, beauty, and elegant circumstances of the prior two, but there’s also a growing frequency of conflict, pettiness, and ugly selfishness.

[Eva]

This had the most exciting plot so far, but it’s also where the tone takes a turn into being more depressing. Baoyu, Daiyu, and even Bao Chai become kind of like a backdrop characters, and we get to see more of the other girls like Xifeng (the one who offers the best plot in my opinion).

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favourite volume in the series so far. It also concludes the portion of this massive novel that scholars are reasonably confident were written by Cao Xueqin himself.

I loved the last two volumes too, but I found certain points in both a bit of a slog, particularly the long poetry sessions and the many mundane moments where nothing really happens. But I found there was less of that kind of thing in this volume, particularly the poetry (which may be a bad thing if you’re a fan of poetry).

Compared to the last two volumes, episodes here swing by at a fast pace and the entire book seems to foreshadow the eventual downfall of the family hinted at, but not properly touched on, at the very beginning. This makes The Story of the Stone begin to feel more like a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end, and less of a soap opera loosely strung together with a succession of random episodes like the previous two volumes.

As the tone of the novel becomes bleaker, the Buddhist and Taoist undertones come to the forefront and, for me at least, leave a lasting impression. This is particularly notable in the tragedy of the You sisters which, as other reviewers echo, is a mini masterpiece. According to an appendix, this haunting drama may have been shoehorned into the novel from a more religious and esoteric story Cao probably aborted, but it doesn’t feel out of place here at all.

Though I’m slowly working my way through this monumental tome, I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience and won’t forget it any time soon. This is really a masterpiece and a must-read for anybody with an interest in China, Eastern thought, and world literature.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Warning Voice” was a good title for the third part of Hawkes‘s translation. The place really picks up in these chapters, as the destiny of the Jias starts to show itself.

[Mary-Jean Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another excellent book in the Story of the Stone series! It was long, but definitely worth it. The part with Jia Lian and Xi Feng trying to sabotage each other was the best, as well as the poetry parts, though I can understand how some people wouldn't enjoy that. The feel of this book was similar to the previous one, though we can definitely see a decline in the management and order of the family that was only seeding previously. I wouldn't say that there was one overarching climax or even central adventure because it is really a story about many people's lives who live within the Jia household. In most books like this, I would get bored, but the characters in Xueqin's novels and the descriptions and interesting events made up for it. The character evolution could have been improved, but, as before, the story covers such a great extent of different people that it didn't matter.
Highly recommended!

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must say that I was very glum when I came to the last chapter of The Warning Voice mostly because this novel is now incomplete. The last 40 chapters of The Story of the Stone are lost to history, some say destroyed by the author's own family for being seditious. Other scholars think that the Qianlong Emperor had the last portion of the novel suppressed. It is generally known from foreshadowing in the beginning of the novel (i.e. a vivid dream that Bao-yu has in a married woman's bedroom or a Red Chamber) that in the last 40 chapters of The Story of the Stone the Manchu government seizes the estate of the Jia family and they are cast into poverty from the heights of affluence. Cao Xueqin was a fantastic author and it seems a shame that the world is denied his complete novel.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A vivid and earthy new translation of what used to be called The Dream of the Red Chamber, this story of the piece-of-jade-become-charmed-human is full of the ways of Chinese aristocrats from the glory days of the Chinese Qing dynasty. You may have a hard time keeping the characters straight, but don't that stop you from enjoying the ins and outs of the men and women of a Chinese court with too much time on its hands and many, many rituals to observe.

This book is generally considered the first novel in Chinese literature, and it is enormous, magnificent, and beguiling. I'm not normally a fan of lengthy translator's introductions, but in this case, I recommend it, because everything about this book is complicated and it helps to understand the background, genesis, meaning, and mores of the times.

[Paulo Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reaching the third volume of The Story of the Stone, one feels like one's meeting old acquaintances; and what fabulous characters they are - Bao-yu, Xi-feng, Grandmother Jia, Jia Lian, Tan Chun, and so many others. The fortunes and misfortunes of this aristocratic 18th century Chinese family make for a remarkable period piece, one goes from feeling annoyed by so much silliness and petty problems (the kind that today would be called First World problems), understanding how the French revolutionaries would wish to cut the head of Marie Antoinette, to feeling engaged by such human and everyday feelings. The writing is simultaneous classically elegant and extremely contemporary - obviously the translator's merit, but I'm sure it's true to the original. Reading this book feels somehow like a guilty pleasure, but I don't regret it. And I'm totally committed to read the next volumes.

[David Gialouras · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading volume 3 before I'd finished volume 2 as I'd forgotten to pack it on my trip to Belgium last month. The Story of the Stone is an easy enough read but there's a lot of it. 845,000 words. It's endlessly fascinating. I first became aware of its existence in the 00s when I was collecting Penguin Classics. There's a lot in it. I've fallen in love with Bao-yu. I find Xi-feng interesting for her intelligence and resourcefulness, in spite of her cruelty to Er-jie for example. It's similar to Tolstoy in may ways and not unlike Dickens in some respects, particularly the maladroit Xue Pan. However Dickens would never write about a homosexual murderer who gets beaten up in a honey trap and bribes the court. Given that it was written in the 18th Century it's way in advance of Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It appears that the fall of this family is as thoroughly detailed as the harmony and opulence of this family was. There was so much harmony in the previous books. There was heartache and some manipulation, but it was good-hearted and childish in general. Bad things happen much more often and with much more venom in this volume, and it is getting worse. Suddenly, we begin to hear frequent mentions of expenditures exceeding incomes. Pawning becomes frequent. Infighting becomes common and there is never a return to control. Things are going bad inside first, and then spreading outward. Again, as I mentioned regarding the previous volume or two, this book may not move fast...but it moves mountains when it does move.

[Laura Stahl · Rating 4 out of 5]

The episodes in this volume revolve around the idea of propriety and violation or transgression of the social order. When the characters face the conflict between fulfilling their desires and upholding Confucian norms, they face punishment. The warning voice, as the added subtitle to the translation indicates, is heard drifting over from the ancestral temple. Punishment for transgressions often takes the form of illness and death. The characters desires paradoxically bind them to the material world and their subsequent punishment prompts their renunciation of that world. Desire in essence forms "the innumerable strands that bind us to the world and it's annoys."

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Volume 3 of the Story of the Stone continues the saga of the Jia family. In this volume readers see signs of what may signal an upcoming decline in the family's fortunes. Money difficulties are hinted at but not taken seriously by most in the family. Volume three highlights the cracks in the surface of the family by taking us inside their domestic lives.

I enjoyed this volume more than the previous one which for me was too filled with poetry (which either didn't translate well or I didn't enjoy). I really liked the detail of domestic hierarchy in the household and found the hierarchy between the maids and ladies to be fascinating and very complex.

[Doug Dalglish · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Though you hide behind a threshold of indestructible iron, the mound shaped like a wheat-cake will claim you for its own." p. 235. Death is the inevitable end - and the death of this wealthy family's good fortune is just as inevitable. Here in Volume 3, they continue to spend money lavishly although anyone who cares to notice sees the end coming. Xi-Feng says, early in this volume, "Because of all the economies I've introduced during these last few years, there's hardly anyone in this household who doesn't secretly hate me. But it's like riding a tiger: I daren't relax my grip for a single moment for fear of being eaten." p. 62

[Rachel C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Major events: Xi-feng's miscarriage and the resultant shuffling of domestic duties; Bao-yu's birthday; Jia Lian's secret second marriage; the engagement of San-jie and Xiang-lian and subsequent events; the death of Er-jie; the death of Skybright; the expulsion of the actresses; the Crab-Flower Club disbands - Bao-chai moves out and Ying-chun gets married.

The juiciest events happened in the Jia Lian / Xi-feng household - that man really did not know his wife at all if he thought his shenanigans would go over well. Intermittent poetry. Financial cracks continued to appear and widen.