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littlemonster's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
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!
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!
reallifereading's review
5.0
“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
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
sookieskipper's review
4.0
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.
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.
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