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aabbasy 's review for:
Monkey: Folk Novel of China
by Wu Ch'eng-En
Ok, if you are into fantastic stories, you should definitely read Monkey.
Firstly, Waley's translation is an abridgement and as he points out in the introduction he did not follow the generally accepted method of keeping all the chapters while making each considerably shorter. What he did instead, was to keep only about one fourth of all the chapters, but the selected chapters appear in their complete form in the book.
Secondly, this book was written in China in the 14th century and the techniques of story telling are dramatically different than what we are used to in so-called "modern" times. To give you an example, the writer does not make use of suspense so much. In many cases, faced with a challenge, one character makes up a plan to solve it, and then everything happens according to that plan, no suspense, no surprise.
Thirdly, it is heavily influenced by Chinese mythology and thus, with Buddhist stories, anecdotes and frames of thinking. There are interesting chapters in the book where you see the conflicts of Buddhists and Daoists, the two main Chinese so-called "religions".
Firstly, Waley's translation is an abridgement and as he points out in the introduction he did not follow the generally accepted method of keeping all the chapters while making each considerably shorter. What he did instead, was to keep only about one fourth of all the chapters, but the selected chapters appear in their complete form in the book.
Secondly, this book was written in China in the 14th century and the techniques of story telling are dramatically different than what we are used to in so-called "modern" times. To give you an example, the writer does not make use of suspense so much. In many cases, faced with a challenge, one character makes up a plan to solve it, and then everything happens according to that plan, no suspense, no surprise.
Thirdly, it is heavily influenced by Chinese mythology and thus, with Buddhist stories, anecdotes and frames of thinking. There are interesting chapters in the book where you see the conflicts of Buddhists and Daoists, the two main Chinese so-called "religions".