长恨歌

by Wang Anyi, 王安忆

"Song of Everlasting Sorrow is a rare work in recent years, as it were: A woman's 40 years of affection and love is rendered by a delicate and gorgeous pen to be plaintive, touching, and full of ups and downs. Everything is fascinating and charming, of which the time passes like water, making one can't but pace up and down, while feeling that death and rebirth are slowly, helplessly lingering in time! 《长恨歌》是一部堪称近年来罕见的作品：一个女人四十年的情与爱，被一枝细腻而绚烂的笔写得哀婉动人，跌宕起伏。一切都是万种风情的，而其中蔓延的水样的时间因素，更是让人有不胜低回之感，让人感觉那种无奈的缠绵在时间中慢慢的逝去和轮回！
"

Genres: China, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Chinese Literature, Asia, Historical, Literature

361 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Wang Anyi (王安忆, born in Tong'an in 1954) is a Chinese writer, and currently the chairwoman of Writers' Association of Shanghai. The daughter of a famous writer and member of the Communist Party, Ru Zhijuan(茹志鹃), and a father who was denounced as a Rightist when she was three years old, Wang Anyi writes that she "was born and raised in a thoroughfare, Huaihai Road." As a result of the Cultural Revolution, she was not permitted to continue her education beyond the junior high school level. Instead, at age fifteen, she was assigned as a farm labourer to a commune in Anhui, an impoverished area near the Huai River, which was plagued by famine.

Transferred in 1972 to a cultural troupe in Xuzhou, she began to publish short stories in 1976. One story that grew out of this experience, "Life In A Small Courtyard", recounts the housekeeping details, marriage customs, and relationships of a group of actors assigned to a very limited space where they live and rehearse between their professional engagements.

She was permitted to return home to Shanghai in 1978 to work as an editor of the magazine "Childhood". In 1980 she received additional professional training from the Chinese Writer's Association, and her fiction achieved national prominence, winning literary award in China.

Her most famous novel, The Everlasting Regret (长恨歌), traces the life story of a young Shanghainese girl from the 1940s all the way till her death after the Cultural Revolution. Although the book was published in 1995, it is already considered by many as a modern classic.

Wang is often compared with another female writer from Shanghai, Eileen Chang, as both of their stories are often set in Shanghai, and give vivid and detailed descriptions of the city itself.

A novella and six of her stories have been translated and collected in an anthology, "Lapse of Time". In his preface to that collection, Jeffrey Kinkley notes that Wang is a realist whose stories "are about everyday urban life" and that the author "does not stint in describing the brutalising density, the rude jostling, the interminable and often futile waiting in line that accompany life in the Chinese big city".

In March 2008, her book The Song of Everlasting Sorrow was translated into English.In 2011, Wang Anyi was nominated to win the "Man Booker International Prize."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Anyi

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The passage of time associated with those old jazz records was indeed a good thing; it had smoothed things out until they were strong and fine, rubbing off the superficial layers to reveal the inner grain, like gold emerging when the fire has burned away the dross. But what he saw that day was not an object, like an old jazz record, but a person.

The closest author comparison I can make to this is that of Proust, but only while ignoring all the elitist claptrap that I myself once partook of in the mistaken belief that it would prove a good shortcut in the realm of literary matters. What I was interested in then was not the efficacies of translation or the technicalities of Modernism, although I tried very hard at these and all the rest of the boxes and labels so adored by my classifying species, but the matter of thought, specifically the type which takes all separation with a grain of salt and treats with fashionable clothing as seriously as it does with the Cultural Revolution. I'm not about to strip Wang Anyi's work and stuff it into the mystical Canon as I have also previously and mistakenly attempted to do with other writing. Frankly, the one thing I'm trying to figure out in this review is why, exactly, this work filled with smackings of Gatsby-type soap opera appealed to me so much, to the point of eyeing its various visual adaptations with increasing fervor.

Hasn't it been said that comedy is created by tearing down trivialities? Trivialities were certainly being ripped up in this city, although if truth be told, a good deal of flesh and bone were also involved.

The problem with those various visual adaptations, however, is the succumbing to impetus the text never involves itself with. Love, war, age, gender roles, modernization, architecture, life imitating art imitating life, memory, cityscape, violence, ideology, yes, yes, yes, but the existence of a woman as the main character does not automatically entail a character-driven entirety. If you know your history in the Shanghai part of the world, you'll understand the backdrop that introduces and draws back the men and women to and from the figure of Wang Qiao, but this novel will never give you your political thriller and/or critique no matter how far you chase. To put it succinctly, this is a work of the Mary Ann Evans sort of philosophy, far more glamour and glitz in its aesthetic and the gendered 'fallen' in its social analysis but, for all that, quotidian. I would think the only reason why I didn't find that last word associated with the mundane is my outsider status, perfectly encompassed by a persisting lack of passport, and yet the word on the grapevine is 'modern classic' and 'best Chinese fiction of the 20th century'. Mandarin and the rest of the Chinese dialects are beyond my ken, but this does make me happy.

Here only one sound had an identity. The lord of all sounds—and that was the sound of the bell tower ringing. It overrides all the other sounds and voices, which form a bed of echoes reverberating through the night. The echoes are the finest strokes of a huge painting that constitutes the deep thought of the night. This sound has a buoyancy that lifts you up and knocks you around as if you were riding on a bed of waves. When people have floating on the waves long enough, they feel hollow inside and out, thoroughly saturated by the night.

In a word, this work is slow, slow, slow. It takes twenty-six pages to introduce Wang Qiao, a name which only surfaces after cities, paintings, brushstrokes and back alleys, parables and pigeons have each had their turn in the build up to this character, whose embodiment of a specific locality of time is as much a doom as the titular reference to a 9th century work of Chinese poetry. For a brain like mine, one which works in holisms and is quickly fatigued by the successive and sensationalist climaxes espoused by both contemporary memes and espoused classics, this book was an utter pleasure, further enhanced by my unawareness that I even enjoyed this breed of aesthetic engagement. A good litmus test for your own purposes is, does the thought of treating with cities and their denizens as springboards for both plot and philosophy appeal? Or, have you seen the film In The Mood For Love and been haunted forever more? If so, you've found your way to the right place.

The curse of translation is, as always, this edition's afterword's rhapsodizing about Wang Anyi's prolific bibliography may never be fulfilled in the English sense within my lifetime. In this at least, for once, youth is on my side.

Yet these are precisely the kinds of wooden and brick boxes within which we live our lives, playing out the good days and the bad.
Let us put the wall back in place; otherwise we will hear cries of mourning, mourning the loss of those vanished days.

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been looking for a modern Chinese novel that was not constructed around the political horrors China has passed through during the past one hundred years. Wang Anyi's beautifully textured novel fits the bill. One cannot quite say that it is apolitical, for the political context is always the white noise humming just outside the Shanghai apartments, restaurants, and shops where Wang Qiyao, whose life this novel traces, and her array of lovers, friends, and family mix and mingle over a period of fifty years. The dominant character in this novel, however, is not Wang Qiyao but Shanghai itself. Wang Anyi has a way of turning the alleys, traditional homes, even the air and the pigeons flying overhead into parts of a vast living organism that is Shanghai, one of the world's most intriguing cities. The book is also about nostalgia in both its constructive and destructive forms. The romance of old Shanghai, a world of class, taste, and style . . . but also a world of sexual exploitation . . . yields to the vulgarity and coarseness of a new and more democratic world. Still, islands of memory remain--Wang Qiyao is one--and those islands become a refuge for younger people who want to glimpse the glory of an age that has past. Wang Anyi's novel is not a page-turner but it is a brilliantly nuanced and highly emotional story of one woman who spans the old Shanghai and the new and who is both a terrible victim of the past and someone whose power over others derives in large measure from the values of that earlier era that she personifies so well.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sunlight and moonlight dominate the Shanghai in which ‘The Song of Everlasting Sorrow’ is set. Dappled sunlight, decorous beneath the dazzling Shanghai mornings, the dull, drudgery of pale, putrid the alleyways between the longtang apartments, the gentle fall of sunlight on a quiet afternoon, the evanescent moonlight, briefly illuminating the beauty of a woman whose life has been worn out beneath the weight of innumerable sorrows; moon-light and sun-light set the stage for the life of Wang Qiyao, whose flame flickers out, slowly and indecorously, whose dreams fall apart one by one, whose wounds, often self-inflicted, serve to sever her from the brief happiness and hope she feels as an adolescent.

It is worth mentioning the poetic style of Wang Anyi. Reminiscent of the old Chinese masters, she is able to render the environment with a life of it’s own. The Shanghai she creates is, along with Wang Qiyao the central character of the novel, its moods and beauty, its superficial loveliness and insurmountable depths of gloom are reminiscent of Wang herself;

“One strand at a time, the first rays of the morning sun shine through just as, one by one, the city lights go out. Everything begins from a cover of light fog, through which a horizontal ray of light crafts an outline as if being drawn by a fine brush.”

Rarely heavy-handed, Wang Anyi delicately traces the finery and finesse of Shanghai, the magic of it’s street and heady atmosphere, gaudy with gossip and home to vast crowds of people, home to a million lives and stories. The principal story we follow is that of beautiful Wang Qiyao. Wan Qiyao’s star rises, briefly, as she is crowned ‘Miss Third Place’ in a beauty contest, however it flickers fulminously beneath the irrepressible light of the movie camera where he mediocrity is exposed. Although Wang’s life is tragic, this is mostly self-inflicted; she constantly rejects the love and friendship people offer her; discarding friends when it suits her, or disregarding the love of men, such as Mr Cheng, who truly love and care for her in favour of the superficial desire of Director Li; her life becomes a series of might have beens and could have beens, of unfulfilled potential, a life doomed to fade out beneath the half-light of a Shanghai afternoon.

There is a rich side cast of characters in the novel, from the reticent and sensitive Jiang Lii, whose love of literature is transformed into a fervour for Communism, to the lachrymose Mr Cheng, whose calm poise is shattered by his love for-and rejection by Wang Qiyao, or Wang Qiyao’s daughter the superficial and glib WeiWei. All of the characters have their own foibles and flaws and Wang is able to draw the rich tapestry of Chinese society. In a time of revolution and upheaval for Wang what was more important was capturing the lives of Chinese citizens, a change in women’s fashion counted more for Chang because such changes had a personal impact, because these kind of changes, although superficial, documented the ordinary lives of Chinese citizens in a way that a simple historical analysis doesn’t. In a way the story of Wang Qiyao, who foresees her own murder as an adolescent and whose last sight on earth is slow, sonorous swing of a lamp is as important as any political documentation of pre and post-revolution China because it captures the personal lives of people caught up in the political upheaval, lives which were doomed to be forgotten, to be lost within the vestiges of time;

“The boats and carts along the interminable waterways crawl on for all eternity. Time is a wall forged of metal that no one will break through. No one can withstand time, The earth endures season after season of planting and harvesting. Waterfowl sing the same tune for hundreds of years. And in a scale of time where the units are counted in centuries, people are as ephemeral as fireflies.”

[Sharlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The longtang are the backdrop of this city. Streets and buildings emerge around them in a series of dots and lines, like the subtle brushstrokes that bring life to the empty expanses of white paper in a traditional Chinese landscape painting. As day turns into night and the city lights up, these dots and lines begin to glimmer. However, underneath the glitter lies an immense blanket of darkness – these are the longtang of Shanghai.”

Wang’s writing style takes a while to get into. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (长恨歌) opens with details of the longtang or neighbourhoods within enclosed alleys of Shanghai. It’s a beginning that requires some patience from the reader. Because plenty of beauty awaits within.

“Four decades the story spans, and it all began the day she went to the film studio.”

Wang Qiyao is taken to a film studio by her classmate Wu Peizhen. There a director notices her and asks her to a screen test. However he realizes that:

“Wang Qiyao’s was not an artistic beauty, but quite ordinary. It was the kind of beauty to be admired by close friends and relatives in her own living room, like the shifting moods of everyday life; a restrained beauty, it was not the kind that made waves. It was real, not dramatic”.

To make up for it, he asks his friend Mr Cheng, a photographer, to take some pictures of her and one of them is published in a newspaper and Shanghai begins to notice her:

“The girl in the picture was not beautiful, but she was pretty. Beauty is something that inspires awe; it implies rejection and has the power to hurt. Prettiness, on the other hand, is a warm, sincere quality, and even hints at a kind of intimate understanding.”

She is convinced by the photographer Mr Cheng and her classmate Jiang LiLi to join the Miss Shanghai contest, where she becomes known as ‘Miss Third Place’:

“Girls like Miss Third place, however, are a part of everyday scenes. They are familiar to our eyes, and their cheongsams never fail to warm out hearts. Miss Third Place therefore best expresses the will of the people. The beauty queen and the first runner-up are both idols, representing our ideals and beliefs. But Miss Third Place is connected to our everyday lives: she is a figure that reminds us of concepts like marriage, life, and family.”

This is just the beginning of Wang Qiyao’s story. She gains the attention of a high-powered man, who essentially makes her his ‘apartment lady’ or mistress. After his accidental death, she is forced to restart her life in a different longtang, taking on the identity of a widow, making ends meet by giving injections (yes, this puzzles me too, apparently people come to her for various injections such as vitamins and “placenta fluid”). She makes new friends, starts to have a clandestine relationship with one of her mahjong partners (he is from a wealthy family) and finds herself with child.

While Wang takes us through the years of Wang Qiyao’s life, an aura of mystery still wafts around her. She is quite the enigma.

“She is the heart of hearts, always holding fast and never letting anything out.”

She is that woman at the party who sits quietly in the corner sipping tea. Not the life of the party (she is after all, much older than the rest of the partygoers) yet the eye is drawn to her:
“She was an ornament, a painting on the wall to adorn the living room. The painting was done in somber hues, with a dark yellow base; it had true distinction, and even though the colours were faded, its value had appreciated. Everything else was simply transient flashes of light and shadow.”

This is not just Wang Qiyao’s story but the story of Shanghai, as we move from the 1940s to the 1980s.

“Shanghai in late 1945 was a city of wealth, colours, and stunning women… Shanghai was still a city of capable of creating honor and glory; it was not rules by any doctrine, and one could let the imagination run wild. The only fear was that the splendor and sumptuousness of the city were still not enough.”

In 1960 though, times have changed drastically.

“In the still of the night the city’s inhabitants were kept awake not by anxious thoughts but by the rumblings of their stomachs. In the presence of hunger, even the profoundest sadness had to take second place, everything else simply disappeared. The mind, stripped of hypocrisy and pretensions, concentrated on substance. All the rouge and powder has been washed away, exposing the plain features underneath.”

Then in the 1980s, Shanghai is booming. Construction sites abound in this new districts’ “forest of buildings”:

“This was indeed a brand-new district that greeted everything with an open heart, quite unlike the downtown area, whose convoluted feelings are more difficult to grasp. Arriving in the new district, one has the feeling that one has left the city behind. The style of the streets and buildings – built at right angles in a logical manner – is so unlike downtown, which seems to have been laid out by squeezing the emotions out from the heart.”

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow was such a different read for me. It moves at a very gentle pace and is probably best described as a portrait of Wang Qiyao’s life. Yet I was drawn to her melancholic story, to Wang Anyi’s intricate depiction of Shanghai through these volatile years. It’s an enduring, elegant novel, and one of my favourite reads so far this year.

Originally posted on my blog Olduvai Reads

[Andrew]

Think a Chinese Zola -- an epic novel of social change revolving around the life of a single woman, from her youth in the glittering heyday of Paris-of-the-East Shanghai, to the tumult of the Deng Xiaoping era. This alone should be a ringing enough endorsement.

Wang Anyi's relationship to the upheavals of 20th Century China is also fascinating, and often in a rather perverse way. While the great realists of the 19th Century whom Wang takes her cue from -- Zola, Balzac, Tolstoy -- were all able to toss full-fledged political bombs, you can sense the invisible bonds of self-censorship. The 1948 Revolution is almost an afterthought, and the Cultural Revolution is addressed more like a sidenote ("and then times were tough and shit"). It's only when Deng enters the scene that Wang Anyi actually comes out guns blazing, and her narration doesn't really pass judgment on the developments of the 1980s, it just comments. Frankly, she's a bit of a genius at evasion of the issue -- somehow (and I'm not sure if this is what she was going for) all that self-censorship makes me notice the elephant in the room even more.

[donnalyn ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Reviewed AGAIN May 2021]
It’s sooo unbearably beautiful. That’s why I thought I could never reread it, because you just need to feel that way once, you don’t need to feel it over and over...ahh. All the beauty in this book is described as joy mixed with sorrow. Constantly feeling like you are living your beautiful ordinary life and it inevitably just passes and nothing will ever be the same and you grow older but all of your memories are a very deep ache....happiness that is defined by emptiness somehow....And it's just women's woes....it makes me think about the pain of marriage also being a mourning of girlhood, and the tender friendship between women, esp young girls, and just . WOMEN'S WOES. It does remind me a bit of Pachinko in the way that it crosses multiple generations and time periods, but in a different way that feels more microscopic, like historical and political changes are just the backdrop for the characters’ lives as they grow older. It’s a very interesting and a different way of writing Chinese historical fiction, where nostalgia isn’t just for the nation, but for people, memories, ideas. It feels so tactile and real, like we’re there too.

It’s also the most beautiful book ever about ~fashion~, I do love to read about history through dress and the intimate scrutiny of everyday details...It's very...My Thesis....And how do I describe the specific sadness of reading this translated novel about Shanghai while eating my store-bought siopaos...What am I supposed to do with that heart-achey feeling. What does it mean to mourn what you haven't lost. That's what this book keeps asking over and over. Longing as a stubborn feeling & tiny nostalgia for everything, especially in a city like Shanghai. Now that it's all over, and I will never read this book ever ever again (for real this time), I feel ancient and also like a baby bird. I want to go to a party and eat hot pot and talk to lots of people just for the sake of being Alive in this brief moment that we are alive. I also want to throw this book far away from me or lock it in a box because I can't get too nostalgic or I'll simply wilt away. It just makes me miss a lot of things, like home, or the idea of home, or the home I couldn’t have :-( it’s the song of everlasting sorrow fr... can’t express how much I cherish and care for this book to the point where reading it causes me sincere anguish.

[Reviewed August 2019]
I read this while I was in Shanghai, and it was really, really wonderful. Sounds so dramatic but it was very surreal and unlike anything I've ever experienced before. I lived on the exact road that Wang Anyi was writing about, and it just made me feel like ! wow!!! so this is how life is!!!!! I also feel like it made me closer to the city. The writing is just so beautiful. I'm sad that I have to return to this to the library, it's like $70 for me to buy my own copy o__o. Perhaps it is a book that I could have only read at that particular time in my life, and I will never be able to reread it because it won't be the same. But I loved it a lot, I felt like I lived in it. I loved how Wang Anyi took time in every chapter to tell us about how the pigeons were doing. The pigeons are the heart of this city!! I think it is truly the best book to be called "the novel of Shanghai". So special.

[Arjen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Chinese novel, if I may generalise, is too one dimensional to my taste. This masterwork is another example, it’s literary machinations too obvious, it’s characters not universal, it’s descriptions too wordy and not vivid. Like another reviewer wrote: too much telling and too little showing; in fact it was so much telling that my e-reader showed I used up over 23 hours to reach the last page.

Time and again I thought: really? Eating western food during the 60’s was a regular thing?... even now there are hardly any western restaurants run by local Chinese in the city of Shanghai. The descriptions Wang Anyi gives are often bookish and stereotypical, in only a rare few instances you feel that she has lived through any of these events or emotions herself. I'm as yet unconvinced that the author has been to a party or listened to a jazz record herself.

The historical backdrop of the story is dramatic, but the hints that filter through into the story are too light, even if this was intentional it should have been done better. The story leaves you wondering how Wang Qiyao managed to lay low in her Longyang apartment during the heights of the cultural revolution with not a knock on her door, a denouncement here or there, or a family moving into her two room apartment.

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai by Wang Anyi opens with exquisite descriptions of Shanghai and its distinct and mysterious longtang - neighborhoods that are as much a character as Wang Qiyao, a former beauty queen whose life has gone sadly awry. Wang Oiyao, comes together with people, only to drive them away in the end, unaware of her impact on others as her country is on its people

[Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have so many thoughts on this book.
Disclaimer: this book is not a page-turner and should not be read in just a few sittings. I recommend taking time to absorb the imagery, setting descriptions, and characterizations.
The first thing I noticed about this book was its setting descriptions. I posted about them multiple times on social media because I was so floored by all the imagery and the atmospheric details. It wasn't like I was seeing a Shanghai longtang myself, but rather I was someone who used to live in one and was reflecting on/romanticizing its beauty. Props to the translator, since I'm sure the original version had many idioms, and Chinese can express eloquence and imagery with much less words/characters than English.
This book is incredibly nostalgic, even if you have never experienced pre-liberation Shanghai. The timelessness of the main character, Wang Qiyao, through the decades of eras and passing people in her life, is incredibly done. Even though none of the side characters are strong or three-dimensional, I didn't mind since the role of these characters are mostly to build Wang Qiyao's cyclical/pitiful life.
I still feel so empty after finishing, like I've lived part of Wang Qiyao's life and had to carry her sorrow--even a fraction of it is too heavy to bear. The ending shows that no human can truly be timeless, but the spirit of the longtang and the secrets carried by pigeons will continue to live on.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with all Mandarin to English translations, but despite the pretty prose, it felt somewhat stiff and unnatural (a lot of telling rather than showing), which made this a 4 star rating.

In summary: best prose I've ever read, but lacking in plot action and character strength. Definitely a novel that conveys a feeling/idea rather than a story.



Quotes I liked:

“The longtang of Shanghai exude a sensuality like the intimacy of flesh on flesh—cool and warm, tangible and knowable, a little self-centered.”

“The bedchamber in a Shanghai longtang is a place where anything can happen, where even melancholy is noisy and clamorous. When it drizzles, raindrops write the word “melancholy” on the window. The mist in the back longtang is melancholic in an ambiguous way—it unaccountably hastens people along. It nibbles away at the patience she needs to be a daughter, eats away at the fortitude she must have to conduct herself as a woman. It tells her that the arrow is on the bowstring, about to fly, that the gold pin is in the box, and all is ready. Every day is more difficult to endure than the last, but, on looking back, one rues the shortness of the time.”

“They had spent an entire morning baring their souls to one another with little thought for what might be gained or lost. These unhurried interludes that usually lead nowhere—rather extravagant in this fast-paced world—often turn out to be the most precious and unforgettable moments in our toilsome lives.”

“There was a great deal of thinking going on around Peace Lane, but much of it, like sediment, had sunk to the bottom of people’s hearts, all the juice squeezed out of them, so that they had solidified and could no longer be stirred up. Wang Qiyao had not reached this stage. Her thoughts still had stems, leaves, and flowers, which glimmered in the dark night of Peace Lane.”

“The sound of raindrops pattering on the window was the weather speaking its heart, the broth in the pot was boiling with the fire’s innermost thoughts, the heavy drapery in the window and the pink lamp were silently speaking their hearts.”

“However, the small always ends up nourishing the great; big things survive by consuming the carcasses of the little. But do not look down on even the most minute of things; for with the coming of daybreak, even the tiniest particles of dust in this world sing and dance in the sunlight.”

“The noise of things stirring in the night deep in those winding alleys was the sound of people living out their modest lives. Their steps are smaller than the movement of the second hand on a clock, but with each forward movement they still make a slight squeaking sound; and though they are lighter than a feather, they still leave behind their footprints, which are always moving steadily forward. The sounds of their songs and tears are barely audible, because they keep their emotions pent up inside. It is only when you lift your eyes to the mist enveloping the sky above the longtang that you discover their sorrow and their sweetness.”

“The exultations and lamentations of 1965 were all like this, grand in an insignificant way. Tempests in a teacup, they yet had a beginning and an end, and were enough to take up a whole lifetime. The noises they made were petty and weak; even exerting their greatest effort, they were unable to make the sound carry. Only when holding one’s breath could one hear the faint buzzing and droning, but each sound was enough to last a lifetime. Gaining strength in numbers, they converge into a large mass hovering over the city sky. They form what is known as a “silent sound,” which sings its melody above the raucous noises of the city. One calls it a “silent sound” because it is tremendously dense and enormously large, its size and density equal to if not exceeding its “silence.” The same method is found in traditional Chinese landscape paintings, where shading and texture in rocks and mountains are created by using light strokes of ink. And so, this “silent sound” is, in truth, the greatest of all sounds, because it is where sound itself begins.”

“Do you know what clothing is? To them clothing is life itself. You might accuse them of vanity, but if they were not supported by an inner strength, they would not be able to sustain the external beauty. They know their destiny better than anyone else; they know that they will never have a share of the world’s larger glory; all they can do is fight for their moment in the limelight, when they adorn the world’s larger glory. They don’t entertain illusions and extravagant dreams, but that isn’t to say that they are not ambitious; you would be hard pressed to find anyone as conscientious and meticulous.”

“When the window curtains moved gently, you might say that what you saw was the wind, but what Wang Qiyao saw was time.”

“The hours between two and three o’clock in the morning are the most peaceful hours, a time when even the insects are dreaming. The dreams of that hour are the soundest of all dreams—airtight, so that not even the wind can creep in—this is the hour people need to recover from the exhaustion of the previous day. The streetlights on Huaihai Road continued to shine quietly, lighting up the deserted road.”

“Only the pigeons would bear witness. They are the offspring of those birds of four decades before; generation after generation, their line never stops and everything is recorded in their eyes. You can hear them cooing and know that their nightmares are born of the nights of man. How many unsolved crimes there are in this city, all committed during those late-night hours in the long, dark longtang alleys that run like cracks through the city, never to see the light of day. When day breaks and the flocks of pigeons take to the sky, you will see that the moment they suddenly leap into the air carries with it a sudden terror. The eyes of these mute witnesses are filled with blood; countless injustices remain sealed away in their hearts. The whistles of the pigeons are clearly cries of mourning; it is only thanks to the vastness of the sky that they do not sound so harsh. The pigeons fly circles in the sky, but never go far; they are expressing their condolences for all the lost souls in this old city. Amid the forest of new skyscrapers, these old longtang neighborhoods are like a fleet of sunken ships, their battered hulls exposed as the sea dries up.”

[Sookie · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the time Wang Anyi introduces her protagonist Wang Qiyao, she shares an intimate tour of the city, Shanghai. Wang Anyi takes time to tell her readers the long intricate alleys, the way gossip travels through crevices of shared walls, the beautiful view of the city through the eyes of its pigeons and the changing times when girls dream of beauty pageants and PhDs.

The protagonist and Shanghai are coming to terms with China's newfound modernity and the influence of the west on the country, on the city and its people. The politics of the time hovers throughout the story as a ghost; unseen but its presence felt in the sidelines. Wang Qiayo is representative of the women who want independent lifestyle defined on their own terms. The men she invites into her life are all shaped by the idea of Shanghai - in the way the essence of the city sticks to the skins of everyone encompassing it, its diverse population in terms of nationality and ethnicity. These men chip away a part of Wang Qiyao and she drudges through life as cultural changes and political rallies heat up the world around her.

Like the city, Wang Qiyao moves to motherhood with grace and nonchalance. The idea of a child, a daughter encourages her to reflect on her own life, her choices and the sorrows it brought. She is kind to herself when she remembers some of the good times and handful or relationships that still remain. Her life ends in the way all her choices end - in tragedy. The city chose her, shined its lights on her as sprung into Shanghai society scene with a picture of her printed in a magazine, and took the spotlight in the hands of a scam artist.

Wang Anyi's poetic prose is best when she writes Shanghai as a strong character. She withholds Wang Qiyao's thought process when the protagonist makes decisions that irrevocably affects her life. Its well understood that Wang Qiyao wants the life of glamor and loves the society life that the city offers but the readers aren't made privy to motivation behind some of her actions. The writing is appealing but the narration gets in the way of plot. The abruptness of ending works to the advantage of the plot but the time taken to get there, is heavy handed with exhausting drama.

The title - The Song of everlasting sorrow is a disclaimer, a promise, a spoiler alert, an eventuality that the reader knows is coming when Wang Qiyao is first introduced. Just how a tabloid garners one's attention towards it, Wang Qiyao stays on the page; never really leaving and inching closer along the edges.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

men are horrible and life is long. patriarchal ideas are suffocating. i'm sad

[Charles Laughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Splendid translation of a fine novel, way to go Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan!

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Content Warning: death, violence, murder, misogyny, abortion, cancer, suicide.


Born in the '30s, Wang Qiyao is the typical Shanghai girl, lured in by the glamour of the city and doing her best not to be eaten up by it. A remarkable beauty, but emotionally both sensitive and slightly cold, we follow her across the decades as she struggles through the end of the Japanese occupation, the rise of Communism and her own interpersonal dramas. Beset by tragedy, Qiyao finds herself becoming just like the tragic heroines she grew up reading about and watching onscreen...

This book came onto my radar very recently -- I discovered its existence in the same month I ended up reading it. While it wasn't originally on my September reading list, I had some room and decided that I'd take the plunge with this. If you've read my blog before, or even just explored my Goodreads, it's probably pretty obvious that I love historical fiction, particularly when it takes place in another country (or, even better, on another continent entirely). The author herself was a fascinating person, and as soon as you step into the world she's created on the page, it's clear how much she loves Shanghai and the people that live there.

Although Wang Qiyao is our heroine, Shanghai itself serves not only as the backdrop, but as the counterpart to Qiyao's narrative. The first few chapters describe in vivid detail the longtang that Qiyao grows up in, the pigeons who roost in the city, the lives of the people there as they go about their daily routines, and although it immediately transports you into Qiyao's life, it's borderline tedious. For a moment, I thought: is this going to work for me?

I'm glad I stuck with it, because in the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this expansive and almost epic novel. The characterization is not especially powerful, and it was sometimes difficult for me to sympathize with Qiyao (who often came across as distant and cold), but there's something magical about the world that Wang crafts in this story. It's a depiction of the Shanghai of old, in its days of splendor and opulence, and the new Shanghai, which is constantly recreating itself. By the halfway point I liked Qiyao, even if I struggled to understand her motivations, and the other characters populating her circle were equally engaging, mostly because they were so deeply flawed and therefore both relatable and sometimes despicable.

There's no real plot, but that's not something that bothers me at all; I'm a huge fan of character-driven novels, and I find it rewarding to follow a character over the course of their life. Qiyao experiences many hardships, setbacks and tragedies, lending it the slight taste of a melodrama, which doesn't cheapen the story but instead makes you feel as if you're watching an opera. Keep in mind that this book is very heavy, with only the tiniest glimpses of joy smattered amongst the otherwise bleak landscape that makes up Qiyao's life.

If you enjoy some of the abovementioned things (such as character-driven stories, very rich descriptions and attention to detail), I highly recommend this sad, sweeping tale that gives the sensation of being swept into the past.

For more of my reviews, check out my blog!

[Sara Morelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don't know how to rate this because this is the book I'm working on for my uni dissertation. I didn't read it to enjoy it nor judge it, hence why it's so hard to form an opinion of my own. The title sure does reflect the tone and subject of the story. It's an intellectual and literary work, so it can be a bit dense to read - but I really don't know. Sorry.

[giulz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probabilmente nel mondo della letteratura cinese questo è il romanzo con la scrittura più ricca e affascinante tra quelli che ho letto finora. La storia mi ha fatto provare tanteee emozioni ci ripenserò spesso in futuro.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is largely about mood, feeling, and atmosphere. It’s beautiful and enjoyable. The characters are somewhat unknowable, and the plot somewhat bare, but the general feel of this book really sweeps the reader up.

[Annie Yotova · Rating 4 out of 5]

The city of Shanghai had always been different - a bridge between the East and the West, with its own culture and traditions. In its longtang, people are used to living almost on top of each other and knowing everything about their neighbors.

Wang Qiyao was born in one of the houses in these alleys and in 1946, after the Japanese finally leave China is ready to conquer the world. Her tickets to fame are her beauty and her fashion sense - the first will fade with time, the latter will carry her through the next 40 years. The novel spans the 4 decades from 1946 to 1986 - from the days immediately after the war, through the creation of the PRC, the Great Leap Forward and the famine, the Cultural Revolution and the opening to the world. But it is not about the big events - they are there in the background but almost never called by name - instead we see how they change the life of Wang Qiyao and those around her instead. You do not need to know much about Chinese history to enjoy the novel but a general idea of the period and what happens in what order helps to put things into perspective.

It all starts almost like a dream - after failing to get a role in a film, Wang Qiyao ends up as the second runner up in the Miss Shanghai contest and that propels her to some fame. It looks like she is set for life when she chooses to become a concubine (an old tradition in China) but then the world changes and that one decision marks her life forever. She falls in love a few times in the decades that follow and she even manages to get a daughter but the carefree and almost naive girl of the 1940s grows into a beautiful and cold woman who uses the people she needs to (when she does not have other choices anyway) and lives her own life. Except that she never finds what she looks for - her connections never really become very close ones, one set of friends replaces another and you can almost see the echoes in the later ones - they look like a faded copy of the original. China and Shanghai change all the time but not always in the direction she needs them to go - by the time the world finally gets to some approximation of the old world, Wang Qiyao is the faded copy. And yes she keeps trying - because she just do not know how to give up. People die around her, other disappear but she is still there - the woman of Shanghai.

It is a fascinating story but the style takes awhile to get used to. It switches between lyrical and everyday all the time - sometimes inside of the same sentence. It took me awhile to place the style - despite when it was written and the time it covers, its style is closer to the Victorian novels and the Russian and French novels of the 19th century than to anything more modern. Once that clicks, once you resolve the disjointedness coming from the conflicting style and story, it becomes a lot easier to read.

The end was not really surprising - the way it happened came almost as a shock but the novel was always going to lead there - there was no other ending possible for Wang Qiyao.

I still cannot decide if the novel was overly long or if it had to be that long. The style takes awhile to grow on you but once it does, it feels almost natural - I cannot imagine Wang Qiyao's story told in any other way. You do not even need to like her - I found a lot of her actions questionable and her self-serving as a whole. But then everyone is an egoist when it gets down to their survival and Wang Qiyao manages to survive (with a bit of a help from a dead friend's gift when at the end of it. It is somewhat ironic that what makes it possible for her to survive is also what makes her story unchangeable - the author almost talks directly to her in the last pages of the novel but even that cannot change the trajectory her life had always been on).

The edition I read has two notes - a translator note at the start (which explains some changes done for readability - apparently the Chinese text was even denser, with run-on sentences and direct speech directly incorporated into the narrative with no markers where it is) and an afterword by Berry (which most publishers and editors would have called Introduction and put at the front of the book) which gives some context and details that help understand the novel better (and spoil it if you read it first).

I am not sure if I can recommend this novel - not because it is a bad one but because I really don't know who it will work for. It is not exactly literary, it is nor exactly realism and it is not exactly 19th century and somehow it is all of that and then something else which is even harder to define. And yet, I am very happy that I read it.

[Scaffale Cinese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fin dalle prime pagine Wang Anyi ci fa capire chiaramente che nel romanzo Shanghai ha un ruolo da protagonista, che condivide con la figura femminile attorno a cui ruotano le vicende narrate: Wang Qiyao. Nonostante le vicissitudini storiche giochino un ruolo importante nel romanzo, determinando le vicende della sua protagonista, la storia della Cina fa soltanto da sfondo. I diversi periodi storici, però, sono chiaramente comprensibili attraverso i cambiamenti culturali e sociali che hanno innescato. La scrittrice, infatti, descrive dettagliatamente le tendenze della moda, le diverse pettinature, i locali e la vita sociale ed è attraverso questi dettagli che fa capire al lettore come cambiano Shanghai e di riflesso la vita di Wang Qiyao.
Wang Anyi scrive pagine e pagine di minuziose descrizioni, in cui riesce a ricostruire l’ambientazione del romanzo in ogni minimo dettaglio, e altre in cui sviscera sensazioni e sentimenti della protagonista. Il risultato è un ritratto epico di Shanghai e della sua eroina.

[Kimfu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once more I've read a Chinese novel that I just couldn't get into. I SHOULD have been able to get into this novel because it talked about the struggles of a woman protagonist. But I just couldn't understand the character. I couldn't feel much empathy for her either. All of the time, I kept thinking, "Just what is going through her mind? Why did she do that? Why did she say that?" She seemed every bit as much a stranger to me at the end of the book as at the beginning.

And the end of the book ended in her murder, so that's ANOTHER reason I should have liked this book because murder novels are one of my favorite genres. But I didn't really find the murder all that exciting. Although, interestingly enough, I could better understand the motives of the murderer than those of the female protagonist.

What I DID find interesting about this book -- and I've never seen this in any other book covering many years of modern Chinese history -- is that all of the historical episodes that were occurring at the exact same time as the story, were kept in the background. It was as if the history of China weren't as important as the history of the female protagonist -- and I guess that's exactly what the author wanted to portray.

This book won lots of awards, so I was able to read a lot of commentary about it. I actually enjoyed the commentary better than the novel itself. And it became clear to me that many people DID like the novel and appreciated the writing style of the author. What a pity that I wasn't one of those people!

I give "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" a 5.5 on a scale of 10.

"The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" is Book No. 21 for 2014!
(二十二)

[Justine Laismith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This literary fiction is translated from a Chinese work. It takes its title from a classic Tang dynasty poem about the tragic love between the Emperor and his favourite concubine.

Right from the opening chapter, the author invites you to step inside the world and relish in every minutiae of Shanghai life. I am amazed at how the author is able to describe so much about everyday things we take for granted, from apartment blocks to pigeons.

I recognised some of the expressions in Chinese. In some ways, I would say the beauty of the language in the original text is lost in translation. I say this because a single word in Chinese, after translation, becomes a three syllable word in English, or a string of words to describe the same context. When the rhythm is lost, the reader can only grasp about 70-80% of the author's original intent.

This story centres on Wang Qiyao, from a high-schooler all the way to her death decades later. Although she is the main character, this account is narrated from a detached omniscient view. Right to the end, I didn't really understand her. I felt as if I've seen her entire life through frosted glass. People came and went in her life. They seem to be drawn to her, but apart from her beauty, I could not understand why. She lived through the tumultuous times in China history, but the author has skirted round these historical events. We get little hints that it's going on outside.

Nonetheless, the unhurried pace allows you to immerse completely in every aspect of Shanghai life.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was another one that felt like a translation, not in a bad way, but just noticeably different than how sentences and paragraphs are typically constructed by native English speakers. The introduction actually included some translation notes about stylistic things that were done to make it easy for English speakers to read, which was quite interesting to think about. Where it stood out to me the most was at the beginning of chapters where the narrative was less like prose and more like poetry - very poignant and descriptive, particularly when describing the city and the life of its own that Wang Anyi creates. The narrative arc itself was pretty meandering - it definitely progresses, but without any rush or a clear goal. It's more like simply following along with life, taking it as it comes and wherever it leads. However, because it follows one person throughout so many different changes, both individually and societally, time almost takes on a life of its own, enhanced by the life of the city and its changes. In the end, there's no huge aha or takeaway, yet it feels like it's been a good use of time to read and immerse oneself in the story, especially because of all the many little truths encountered along the way. In some ways, it reminds me of Gone with the Wind - a sort of sweeping historical drama condensed into the everyday life of one person. Well worth the read.

#womenwritersoftheworld -> Eastern Asia selection (China)

[suvi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this one because I had to read it for a class. I was in no way prepared to fall in love with this book as much as I did.

The story of Wang Qiyao spans through several decades of her life, in small looks through the years. At first I questioned how long this book is, how it must drag along. But while reading I barely noticed the passage of time, like it had stopped. Exactly like Wang Qiyao felt like throughout the book. I was almost surprised when I reached the last page, where had all those words disappeared?

I absolutely adore Wang Anyi’s way of storytelling, it feels like magic. Poetry. It’s beautiful and I could vividly picture the old Shanghai in front of my eyes.

This is my first Chinese literature book that doesn’t focus on either war, the Cultural Revolution or some other way of violence and I greatly enjoyed it. Even though Wang Qiyao’s story is quite sorrowful, it is told in such a calm manner that at times you forget of the hardships.

I also greatly enjoyed how the title “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” prepares you to read a complete heartbreaking story. But Wang Qiyao seems quite content what she has. Even though the hardships she faces, she seems quite happy throughout the years as time goes by.

Oh, I absolutely loved this book and I’m sad I cannot put my love into words. This was also my first work of Wang Anyi’s and I am more than excited to read more of her works!

[Elede · Rating 3 out of 5]

He leído el libro por recomendación de mi novia. Antes de este libro, los últimos meses he estado leyendo la trilogía de Pekín de Mei Wang, de la autora Diane Wei. Me ha gustado mucho esa trilogía, y me gusta conocer más sobre la cultura, pensamiento y pasado de la sociedad china.
Al empezar este libro, esperaba algo parecido. Empaparme de la historia reciente de China, de sus altercados y los efectos que tuvo en su gente.
Sin embargo, en este libro no vas a encontrarte nada de eso. Es un libro extenso (670 páginas) y apenas verás que se hable de la Revolución Cultural, el Gran Salto Adelante u otros movimientos políticos y culturales de China.

El libro es muy poético en su escritura, con muchas descripciones que evocan sentimientos, a mi especialmente la nostalgia.
La primera parte del libro, hasta mitad aproximadamente, se me ha hecho extremadamente pesado. Muy lento, insulso en mi opinión. De mitad para adelante mejora considerablemente.

Mi opinión, es que este no es tu libro a no ser que quieras leer algo relacionado con China y con un lenguaje poético, abstracto incluso en muchas ocasiones.
A mi me ha dejado un buen sabor de boca final, ya que va de menos a más. Pero la primera parte del libro penaliza el resultado final.

[elisabook · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is both well-written and well-crafted. The portrayals of the city are beautifully written, and the author does not just explore relationships between couples but also between groups of three and four, with emotionally intelligent narration. Towards the end of the book you see how the whole book has been crafted to underline the more philosophical point it makes - definitely worth a re-read.

[Graeme · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good novel about Shanghai and its recent history. Perhaps not quite as good as its reputation would lead one to believe, but the novel has some real strengths. Some of the characters are well drawn and believable, and the way the denouement draws a line under a life while echoing an event from early in the story is neatly done.

[Mizuki]

Some years ago there's a movie based on this novel, but I never am interested enough to watch it, and I don't think I'll be interested enough to read the book any time soon.

[Wintersweet Cui · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty women can't have happy ending easily.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unbearable. Trying to read this is torture.

[Krista Woods · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai is exactly as the title indicates; it truly is a novel of Shanghai. While the story appears to follow the life of Wang Qiyao, it's really following the transformation of Shanghai from 1946 until 1986. Wang Anyi's prose is beautiful (and incredible respect and admiration for the translators, which my copy lists as Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan). I was very excited to read this book because I have heard such wonderful reviews. However, it simply fell flat, and I felt it was just meh.

It is not a plot-driven book by any means, but that's because it's less about what is happening to the characters and more about examining the cyclical patterns of life through an aging city through the use of characters. I really enjoyed the examination of the city as a somewhat historical study and social commentary, despite the lengthiness of the book. I find the long descriptions of settings fascinating, personally, and if the book had simply been descriptions of settings written in Wang Anyi's lyrical prose, I would have been absolutely thrilled.

Unfortunately, the characters, and the treatment of the characters, completely ruined it for me. At first I was intrigued by Wang Qiyao and I truly felt bad for her in many instances in the beginning. That quickly turned to indifference and eventually to near disgust. I felt like her character changed very little through the entirety of the novel, and what change did occur was negative. I understand that her character was written to be incapable of maintaining relationships with others, which should be a tragic thing, but it just felt like she was a vain, egotistical, manipulative person with very little else to offer anyone besides nostalgia. And no amount of personal tragedy on her part can make me overlook her bitterness and selfishness. I feel like I should have been moved when Long Legs murdered her, but I wasn't. At all. I literally did not care.

Now moving on to the side characters. Some of them were nice. Wu Peizhen seemed like a decent, potentially multifaceted character, although we are hardly given any time to get to know her. And Mr. Cheng seemed was a nice, steady character, and I truly did feel for him. We at least got some time with him, although he was never mentioned or thought of by Wang Qiyao after his suicide! Mr. Cheng deserved so much better than that.

But then every other secondary character was so flat and one dimensional that I cared very little about what happened to any of them. The only other character I had any actual emotional response to was WeiWei, who annoyed me to no end. The relationship between Wang Qiyao and WeiWei was so infuriating. I just wanted to yell at them to both get over themselves, and I was not upset when WeiWei exited the narrative, which probably should have elicited some sort of sadness from me since she was Wang Qiyao's daughter.

Overall, I was just not impressed with the actual narrative of the story. I understand what it was intended to do, but it just didn't do it for me. The more I read the more I just didn't care, and the main reason I finished it is because I don't like to DNF books. I did still really enjoy the prose at the beginnings of the chapters because they felt like love poems to the city of Shanghai, which I thought was quite nice. But this is not a book that I would recommend.

[fiona]

review of the initial few chapters up to her visit to the film studio

The subtitle of the book is “A Novel of Shanghai” but its protagonist is Wang Qiyao. How is Wang’s story actually a story of Shanghai?

From the beginning of the story, the reader is first introduced to the city of Shanghai and the intricate structure of its neighbourhoods rather than substantial characters relevant to the continuation of the story. In so many ways, the protagonist is the city itself rather than Qiyao. Before the official introduction to Wang Qiyao herself, we see her name used as an adjective to describe every single girl that may live in Shanghai. Therefore, the reader develops an opinion of her from these rumours and stereotypes of what it may mean to be a girl from Shanghai. It completely grounds the character of Qiyao from an elusive mystery and renders her not unique. All these chapters dedicated to the depiction of Shanghai seem to only serve the better portrayal of Qiyao’s character, but in fact, they also allow the continuation of Qiyao’s story to be the iteration of Shanghai as a city and a telling of the city’s story. Much like how the title of “Miss Shanghai” was given to Wang Qiyao her fate echoes that of Shanghai and her personality captures the spirit of the city. Wang Qiyao and Shanghai are two entities that are inseparable and are therefore both the protagonist of the story echoing each other’s narrative.

From the title of the book The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, it is made clear without a doubt that the story of Qiyao would be a tragedy. The tragedy of her story is that she is like every other girl but she craves to be more than the ordinary. When imaging the city of Shanghai, for many the first thing that comes to mind is that it is uproarious. The city is remembered for its vivacity and its metropolitan nature and not for what is described by the author. The author focuses on the mundane and the lived-in rather than the beauty or the modern. Before Qiyao is introduced on her own, she is used as a stand-in for all the maidens of Shanghai signifying her commonness. Like the contrast of the city, Qiyao has her mind set on being a part of larger things but is ultimately stuck within the ordinary.

In many ways, the sorry is a nostalgic love letter from the author to the city. Qiyao’a relationship parallels the relationship between the author and the city. Much like how Perzhen and Qiyao’s friendship is fading, old Shanghai is but a thing of the past that one cannot return to, as heartbreaking as it is,

Qiyao’s most defining feature is her pride. She is aware of her beauty and emotional intelligence. She knows how to act in a manner that would deem her desirable to a man which is to never reveal how she truly feels. This idea of how she should act forces her true identity to be barricaded similar to how the girls of Shanghai seem to be stuck within their homes full of windows in the lanes. She is trapped and she wants out. Her duality of being metropolitan and mundane at the same time deems her the perfect description of Shanghai as a city. Qiyao’s vanity, pride, romance, fashion, and lust are all key traits of the city she inhabits. As the author deemed she is truly a woman of Shanghai it makes sense that her name is used as an adjective to describe all women of Shanghai and her tragedy echoes Shanghai of that time.