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寒夜Cold Nights
This book writes about the life in Chongqing, the so-called 'wartime capital' in 1944-1945. In this novel, the author writes about a poor clerk's family, in which the estrangement between mother and wife and the economic pressure cause a family tragedy, the wife goes away, and the husband dies of lung disease. When the wife goes back to Chongqing, her mother-in-law has moved away with grandchild to somewhere unknown. When the hero of this novel is breathing his last, the beating of gongs and drums resound to the skies, as people are celebrating the victory, burning dragon lanterns with fireworks and firecrackers...
243 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
6 people are currently reading
298 people want to read
About the author
巴金
107 books4 followers巴金（1904年11月25日－2005年10月17日），原名李堯棠，字芾甘，中國四川成都人，祖籍浙江嘉興。現代文学家、出版家、翻譯家。同時也被譽為是「五四」新文化運動以來最有影響力的作家之一，是20世紀中國傑出的文學大師、中國當代文壇的巨匠。
除了魯迅，巴金也是當時中國大陸知識分子的重要代表人物。他的著作有《激流三部曲》(《家》、《春》和《秋》）、《寒夜》等，也創作了多個中篇小說、短篇小說、散文集以及譯著 。
除了魯迅，巴金也是當時中國大陸知識分子的重要代表人物。他的著作有《激流三部曲》(《家》、《春》和《秋》）、《寒夜》等，也創作了多個中篇小說、短篇小說、散文集以及譯著 。
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
April 29, 2017
The tension between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is a classic trope in Chinese culture, and Ba Jin’s 寒夜 (Han Ye / Freezing Nights) makes this a central theme. It does far more than this, however, and in doing so rises to its position as a modern Chinese classic.
In the novel, each of the three main characters, 宣 (Xuan), his mother, and his wife, 树生 (Shu Sen), rise above the usual stereotypes: the weak son, the domineering mother, and the rebellious wife. The mother, who is only ever known by her role and remains nameless throughout, is caught at the wrong end of history. Set in 1945, she was given an education but has never achieved independence, nor has she given up her traditional views of the place of a wife and mother. We see her hatred of her daughter-in-law, but we also understand that this hatred is as much motivated by an unconscious envy for her independence as it is by her fear of being made useless and her resentment of her daughter-in-law’s refusal to be as meek and submissive as she herself must have been to her own mother-in-law.
Shu Sen is every inch a modern woman: she works in a bank and enjoys the benefits of the capitalist world. She is also 35 and in a common law marriage with a man dying of tuberculosis in wartime China. She is keenly aware of her mother-in-law’s scorn and hatred and of her constant attempts to get her son to leave her and find a more “suitable” (i.e., submissive) woman to legally marry. As much as she loves Xuan, she is angered by his refusal to stand up for her to his mother and she despairs of the poverty that they have sunk to. Given the chance by the manager of the bank, who clearly has ulterior motives, to improve her career by taking a position in another city, she finds herself pushed into taking the job when Xuan loses his.
Of the three, Xuan is probably the most one dimensional. He is essentially a good hearted but weak man in a deeply corrupt society that has been tearing itself apart for the last 40 years. He is socially ill at ease, uncomfortable with people, idealistic and literary to a fault. He is clearly no survivor, and has essentially adopted an outlook of victimhood. Angry at the injustice of being treated so poorly but without the survival skills or the ruthlessness to fight back, he finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into despair and pain.
Ba Jin uses this nuanced portrayal of this trio to make trenchant criticisms of Chinese society in that period. Each of the three represent different facets of Chinese society at that time: the hidebound traditionalists incapable of accepting modernity (represented here by Xuan’s mother), the weak intellectual elites incapable of standing up to the traditional powers and equally incapable of effectively adopting modern methods (as represented by Xuan), and the modern but shallow capitalists interested only in their own gain (Shu Sen). He occasionally gets a little heavy handed: a scene where Xuan, who works as an editor, coughs blood on the copy of a draft essay written by an important government official extolling the progress and improvements made by the government for the poor (“Lies! All lies,” he thinks as he coughs blood on the paper.) is a case in point.
The characters rise, nevertheless, above their own stereotypes and their own symbolic roles in the novel to also breathe as fully three dimensional characters. This was so much so for me that I found myself at the end of the novel trying to imagine what might happen to them. The novel ends with the surrender of the Japanese and the hope that things might finally improve. We know, however, that the civil war in China will last another four years. After which, the surviving characters will have the famine of the Great Leap Forward and the terror of the Cultural Revolution to look forward to. If they survive till then, the couple’s child will be about 32 and Shu Sen will be 55. Sadly, given what we are told of the child (a splitting image of his father, and just as bookish and socially inept), one can only imagine the worst possible outcome for him from that bloodbath.
PS: Death by tuberculosis as depicted in this novel is a world away from the romanticized genteel consumptive coughing in La Traviata or The Magic Mountain. Xuan loses his voice and dies in excruciating pain; no room here for a final soaring aria before dying. His wife keeps asking him to go to see a Western trained doctor. However, as I dug around, I realized that effective treatment of tuberculosis was only discovered in 1944 in UK and its use took several years to become widely available. If the novel had been set a few years later, Xuan might have been able to take advantage of the medication, but it was probably not available in China in 1945.
In the novel, each of the three main characters, 宣 (Xuan), his mother, and his wife, 树生 (Shu Sen), rise above the usual stereotypes: the weak son, the domineering mother, and the rebellious wife. The mother, who is only ever known by her role and remains nameless throughout, is caught at the wrong end of history. Set in 1945, she was given an education but has never achieved independence, nor has she given up her traditional views of the place of a wife and mother. We see her hatred of her daughter-in-law, but we also understand that this hatred is as much motivated by an unconscious envy for her independence as it is by her fear of being made useless and her resentment of her daughter-in-law’s refusal to be as meek and submissive as she herself must have been to her own mother-in-law.
Shu Sen is every inch a modern woman: she works in a bank and enjoys the benefits of the capitalist world. She is also 35 and in a common law marriage with a man dying of tuberculosis in wartime China. She is keenly aware of her mother-in-law’s scorn and hatred and of her constant attempts to get her son to leave her and find a more “suitable” (i.e., submissive) woman to legally marry. As much as she loves Xuan, she is angered by his refusal to stand up for her to his mother and she despairs of the poverty that they have sunk to. Given the chance by the manager of the bank, who clearly has ulterior motives, to improve her career by taking a position in another city, she finds herself pushed into taking the job when Xuan loses his.
Of the three, Xuan is probably the most one dimensional. He is essentially a good hearted but weak man in a deeply corrupt society that has been tearing itself apart for the last 40 years. He is socially ill at ease, uncomfortable with people, idealistic and literary to a fault. He is clearly no survivor, and has essentially adopted an outlook of victimhood. Angry at the injustice of being treated so poorly but without the survival skills or the ruthlessness to fight back, he finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into despair and pain.
Ba Jin uses this nuanced portrayal of this trio to make trenchant criticisms of Chinese society in that period. Each of the three represent different facets of Chinese society at that time: the hidebound traditionalists incapable of accepting modernity (represented here by Xuan’s mother), the weak intellectual elites incapable of standing up to the traditional powers and equally incapable of effectively adopting modern methods (as represented by Xuan), and the modern but shallow capitalists interested only in their own gain (Shu Sen). He occasionally gets a little heavy handed: a scene where Xuan, who works as an editor, coughs blood on the copy of a draft essay written by an important government official extolling the progress and improvements made by the government for the poor (“Lies! All lies,” he thinks as he coughs blood on the paper.) is a case in point.
The characters rise, nevertheless, above their own stereotypes and their own symbolic roles in the novel to also breathe as fully three dimensional characters. This was so much so for me that I found myself at the end of the novel trying to imagine what might happen to them. The novel ends with the surrender of the Japanese and the hope that things might finally improve. We know, however, that the civil war in China will last another four years. After which, the surviving characters will have the famine of the Great Leap Forward and the terror of the Cultural Revolution to look forward to. If they survive till then, the couple’s child will be about 32 and Shu Sen will be 55. Sadly, given what we are told of the child (a splitting image of his father, and just as bookish and socially inept), one can only imagine the worst possible outcome for him from that bloodbath.
PS: Death by tuberculosis as depicted in this novel is a world away from the romanticized genteel consumptive coughing in La Traviata or The Magic Mountain. Xuan loses his voice and dies in excruciating pain; no room here for a final soaring aria before dying. His wife keeps asking him to go to see a Western trained doctor. However, as I dug around, I realized that effective treatment of tuberculosis was only discovered in 1944 in UK and its use took several years to become widely available. If the novel had been set a few years later, Xuan might have been able to take advantage of the medication, but it was probably not available in China in 1945.
January 2, 2025
Vaya dramote.
June 25, 2025
Decent writing describes the long, miserable demise of a man who wastes away from disease as he loses everything else dear to him during the last year of WWII.
October 21, 2017
I think that this was the first novel that I read. I was 12 years old. Well, as far as I can remember, that's what it seems like, and I have a memory of the novels I've read after this one, but not of the ones I read before if there were any. I did not remember the name of this novel and actually found it by typing in Google "novel about Chinese man with TB". I knew it was Cold Something, but I couldn't remember what, and then I saw an image of the cover, and I knew I found what I was looking for.
This was the first novel that I cried over. Of course, many of the issues were too complex for me to understand, but I felt the general hopelessness of the main character and it made me extremely sad.
One part stands out in my memory: the main character has a friend, who drinks a lot to drown the sorrow of losing his wife and child (childbirth), and this friend commits suicide by running out in front of a truck? or maybe it was a tank, I cannae remember. But it was a lot to take in.
I didn't exactly cry while reading the book. I just sat tight and compressed my lips. But when I finished reading the book, I felt really funny and went to look at myself in the mirror (perhaps I thought I'd find some answer there :? ) and then I just started crying.
Of course I never could explain to anyone, let alone myself, why I cried, but I felt much better after that.
This was the first novel that I cried over. Of course, many of the issues were too complex for me to understand, but I felt the general hopelessness of the main character and it made me extremely sad.
One part stands out in my memory: the main character has a friend, who drinks a lot to drown the sorrow of losing his wife and child (childbirth), and this friend commits suicide by running out in front of a truck? or maybe it was a tank, I cannae remember. But it was a lot to take in.
I didn't exactly cry while reading the book. I just sat tight and compressed my lips. But when I finished reading the book, I felt really funny and went to look at myself in the mirror (perhaps I thought I'd find some answer there :? ) and then I just started crying.
Of course I never could explain to anyone, let alone myself, why I cried, but I felt much better after that.
July 8, 2014
This book is thoroughly depressing from the first page to the last. It's also extremely sentimental, with someone crying seemingly every other page and with increasing frequency as the story progresses. I recommend it for its depiction of daily life in unoccupied World War 2-era China and its indictment of ineffective or corrupt elites--unfortunately some things never change--which the author implies contributed to the subsequent civil war. Be warned that it won't make you a happier person.
February 20, 2025
Help my (M34) wife (F34) is leaving me, my country is under seige, my mother won't stop arguing with my wife, and I can't stop coughing blood
September 13, 2011
The influence of Russian literature is quite evident: dying of tuberculosis during wartime while your wife cheats on you!
June 12, 2021
"寒夜" is not a particularly bad book, but it is one that offers little to the reader: another story of a poor, frustrated man whose mother and wife (well, not really married; partner) are all the time fighting and bickering (for him, because of him), he some kind of model of patience and understanding.
The problem is precisely this: the characters. The man, the main protagonist, is that kind of man (or sometimes woman) who goes down the rabbit hole of giving up his life for some twisted idea of self-sacrifice for the happiness of others. The partner, a woman who is presented as somewhat frivolous but also dependent of the man. And the mother, one of those over-protective characters who will also give their life for their son. It is too stereotypical, in family relations, in gender relations, in everything and they are not particularly engaging or interesting.
The story revolves around them, so, if you don't find them interesting, the story can't be. There are few and far between glimpses of the world they live in (China during the Second World War) that never become more than that.
The best: the small glimpses into the culture/world of the era
The worst: the story is not particularly original and the characters' behavior frustrating
Alternatives: Other Chinese authors?: Mo Yan or Hua Yu? A very different book, but also (in part) set in World War II and very funny and interesting, Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"
5.5/10
(Catalan translation by Eulàlia Jardí)
The problem is precisely this: the characters. The man, the main protagonist, is that kind of man (or sometimes woman) who goes down the rabbit hole of giving up his life for some twisted idea of self-sacrifice for the happiness of others. The partner, a woman who is presented as somewhat frivolous but also dependent of the man. And the mother, one of those over-protective characters who will also give their life for their son. It is too stereotypical, in family relations, in gender relations, in everything and they are not particularly engaging or interesting.
The story revolves around them, so, if you don't find them interesting, the story can't be. There are few and far between glimpses of the world they live in (China during the Second World War) that never become more than that.
The best: the small glimpses into the culture/world of the era
The worst: the story is not particularly original and the characters' behavior frustrating
Alternatives: Other Chinese authors?: Mo Yan or Hua Yu? A very different book, but also (in part) set in World War II and very funny and interesting, Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"
5.5/10
(Catalan translation by Eulàlia Jardí)
May 16, 2022
La història d'un home pusil·lànime casat amb una dona que representa la modernitat, la cultura, les ganes de viure; però que conviuen amb la mare d'ell, arquetip de la tradició que no vol marxar, de la submissió a l'home i als vells costums femenins. Si ho situes tot durant el conflicte de la Segona Guerra Sinojaponesa (1937-1945) en un hivern fred i amb escassetat de recursos, amb la por de la invasió japonesa i fas d'escenari un pis tancant, ja tens el conflicte a punt d'esclatar.
Brillant en el plantejament, angoixant per moments, t'obliga a prendre posició per una dona o altra, per una manera d'entendre la vida i la feminitat. En Wang, el protagonista masculí, pren la seva decisió i això portarà al desenllaç de la novel·la —que no revelaré—.
Més curta que altres novel·les de Ba Jin, és d'una intensitat aclaparadora. Amb uns diàlegs que agilitzant l'acció i ens permeten coneixes millor els sentiments i emocions de cadascun d'ells.
Molt recomanable.
Brillant en el plantejament, angoixant per moments, t'obliga a prendre posició per una dona o altra, per una manera d'entendre la vida i la feminitat. En Wang, el protagonista masculí, pren la seva decisió i això portarà al desenllaç de la novel·la —que no revelaré—.
Més curta que altres novel·les de Ba Jin, és d'una intensitat aclaparadora. Amb uns diàlegs que agilitzant l'acció i ens permeten coneixes millor els sentiments i emocions de cadascun d'ells.
Molt recomanable.
August 5, 2017
對話生活化，三重視點轉換出色，然而這婆媳大戰夾心餅乾的故事真乏味……話說回來，戰亂時代最無用的大約就是知識分子了，除非他們的位置能為維護文化資產做些甚麼。
October 14, 2018
巴金先生前期和后期的风格差异真的非常大，家春秋更理想化，而寒夜现实了很多。单独了非常具有巴金先生特色的后记又觉得他完全没变。
November 9, 2019
简介里面有一句说得好，『政治尾巴甩的干干净净』。我们文学界一个奇怪的现象，凡是和革命挂钩的文学，大抵是要升两档的，凡事显示出小布尔乔亚的作风的，大抵是要降两档的。但文学本身并不在布尔什维克或是布尔乔亚，文学本身应该在关心人，人的际遇、人的遭遇、人的种种，才是文学的终极关怀
February 9, 2022
似乎在高三的时候不知怎么读过巴金的《随想录》（没记错的话）。当时很是对自己从内到外反思了一番。前段时间去图书馆准备借鲁迅的《坟》，不过没找到，只有鲁迅的一些全集。旁边的书大多都是近现代的大家写的，我便借了这本《寒夜》来看。二百多页的书不多久就读完了，书如其名读之如身处“寒夜”，想抬头寻找希望却寻之不到，想低头落泪也挤不出眼泪。
February 11, 2008
A real downer. It's supposed to be--that's at the core of its importance as a historical artifact of the inter-war period in China (1945-1949). So it's important, but not very fun to read. Blessedly not truly melodramatic; there is some ambiguity to the characters and hence the story.
June 13, 2012
Sad and depressed; but realistic.
March 9, 2014
life . human . love . losts . and war
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews