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A review by pilesandpiles
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai by Wang Anyi
4.0
This is an incredible novel, impressionistic and episodic. I read it because I had watched Stanley Kwan's film adaptation, Everlasting Regret, some years before, but the book is so much about the character's internal life that it is completely different from the movie.
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow follows Wang Qiyao's life in Shanghai from her days as a young girl during World War II through the 1980s. Reading it is like sitting at the shore and watching waves refract. Wang Qiyao's life is divided into three periods, each of which feels like a variation on the others. Each period, although told through a continuous plot, is broken down into vignette-like chapters that feel weighted with both the presence of what is said and the absence of what is not. Desire and melancholy run through the story, finding concrete form here and there in material objects or as the shape of a physical space. Wang Anyi returns again and again to the dynamic of interior and exterior urban experience, rendering the street as a realm of anonymity and privacy and the home as a realm of visibility. It's history as the accretion of sense and mood.
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow follows Wang Qiyao's life in Shanghai from her days as a young girl during World War II through the 1980s. Reading it is like sitting at the shore and watching waves refract. Wang Qiyao's life is divided into three periods, each of which feels like a variation on the others. Each period, although told through a continuous plot, is broken down into vignette-like chapters that feel weighted with both the presence of what is said and the absence of what is not. Desire and melancholy run through the story, finding concrete form here and there in material objects or as the shape of a physical space. Wang Anyi returns again and again to the dynamic of interior and exterior urban experience, rendering the street as a realm of anonymity and privacy and the home as a realm of visibility. It's history as the accretion of sense and mood.