The Dream of the Red Chamber Interpreted by Bai Xianyong 白先勇细说红楼梦

by Bai Xianyong, 白先勇

"The Dream of the Red Chamber is a sealed book, with endless secrets to explore. What's more important, it is a great fiction. Bai Xianyong advocates to read this literature classic completely as a fiction, and he focuses on analyzing the modern features of art in the novel, and analyzes how Cao Xueqin put all the elements making a novel into full play, far beyond his age, and even earlier than Western realism literature.

With the sensitivity of a novelist, he shows us the figures not valued by history, and the character misunderstood, showing us the original charm of these characters.
《红楼梦》是一本天书，有解说不尽的玄机、探索不完的秘密，但最重要的，它终究是一部伟大的小说。白先勇正本清源，把这部文学经典完全当作小说来导读，侧重解析《红楼梦》小说艺术的“现代性”，检视曹雪芹如何将各种构成小说的元素发挥出来，并远远超越它的时代，甚至比西方现代主义文学更早、更前卫。
他以小说家的艺术敏感，擦去经典的蒙尘之处，将历来被冷落的人物、被曲解的角色一一归还原本的个性姿彩，令其登台绽放。"

1056 pages, Paperback

Published March 6, 2017

About the author

Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai (Chinese: 白先勇; pinyin: Bái Xiānyǒng; Wade–Giles: Pai Hsien-yung; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Pe̍h Sian-ióng; born July 11, 1937) is a Chinese writer based in Taiwan who has been described as a "melancholy pioneer". He was born in Guilin, Guangxi at the cusp of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Pai's father was the Kuomintang (KMT) general Bai Chongxi (Pai Chung-hsi), whom he later described as a "stern, Confucian father" with "some soft spots in his heart." Pai was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of seven, during which time he would have to live in a separate house from his siblings (of which he would have a total of nine). He lived with his family in Chongqing, Shanghai, and Nanjing before moving to the British-controlled Hong Kong in 1948 as CPC forces turned the tide of the Chinese Civil War. In 1952, Pai and his family resettled in Taiwan, where the KMT had relocated the Republic of China after defeat by the Communists in 1949.