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131 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1936
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About the author
Lu Xun
1,086?books366?followersLu Xun (鲁迅) or Lu Hsün (Wade-Giles), was the pen name of Zhou Shuren (September 25, 1881 – October 19, 1936), a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. Writing in Vernacular Chinese as well as Classical Chinese, Lu Xun was a novelist, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, and poet. In the 1930s he became the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai.
For the Traditional Chinese profile: here.
For the Simplified Chinese profile: 鲁迅
For the Traditional Chinese profile: here.
For the Simplified Chinese profile: 鲁迅
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September 30, 2023
"I see my fate has been in the balance since I trod on those records of the past. When I flick through through the history books I find no dates, only those fine Confucian principles 'benevolence, righteousness, morality' snaking their way across each page. I finally glimpsed what lay between every line in every book: 'Eat People!' " - Diary of a Madman
"The raucous chorus would begin once more: 'Stealing again?' Kong Yiji's eyes would bulge with outrage: 'Stealing books is no crime! Is scholarship theft?' He would argue back illustrating his point with a perplexing smatter of archaisms: 'Poverty and learning, oft twixt by jowl!' at which everyone in the tavern would collapse with mirth." - Kong Yiji
"Ah-Q began to say out loud what at first he only thought. In this way his tormentors learned of his habit of declaring moral victory over the ashes of defeat. While yanking on his ponytail they went on to give his head the time honored bashing against the nearest hard surface, their hearts again singing with the joys of victory." - The Real Story of Ah-Q
"There are some victors who delight only in victory against worthy adversaries, to whom the conquest of the weak or stupid is as dust or ashes in their mouths. This was not a weakness to which Ah-Q in his inexhaustable delight with himself was susceptible, perhaps living proof of the global superiority of Chinese civilization." - The Real Story of Ah-Q
**
Lu Xun was China's seminal modern writer during the early 20th century. He came from a formerly wealthy family fallen into debt from civil service and legal system bribery. In 1902 Lu pursued a western style medical education in Japan but decided literature could do more to modernize China. After WWI the Versailles treaty awarded Japan Chinese territory protests sparked a New Culture Movement, with science and democracy promoted over the traditional Confucian system.
Lu published three books of short stories in his life, Outcry (1923), Hesitation (1926) and Old Stories Retold (1935). He employed irony and satire to expose ignorance in the lower classes and hypocrisy in the upper. Mao posthumously co-opted him as a hero of the revolution, replacing complex prose with simple propaganda of socialist realism. Lu was a poet, essayist and translator of European literature. All thirty four stories he wrote are included in this collection.
In 'Outcry' a madman suspects cannibalism in his family and village, an indigent scholar who steals books has his legs broken, a father buys medicine made from the blood of an executed revolutionary. A widow squanders her savings on a folk doctor and funeral director, a rickshaw puller helping an injured pedestrian incurs the wrath of his passenger. The politics of Qing and Republican hair styles are revisited. Lu's stories illustrate problems caused by attitudes of people.
The title 'Real Story of Ah-Q' is a cringe inducing portrait of a loser convinced of his own excellence in the face of others contempt. He boasts descent from illustrious ancestors who disown him. He scorns the students of westernized schools as fake foreign devils and persecutes his lessers. Concerned to leave no heir he assaults his employer's maid, cast out he turns to crime. As the Republican revolution approaches he sees his opportunity to wreak vengeance upon the villagers.
In 'Hesitation' a beggar's life of misfortune is told on the New Year, an encounter with an old friend reveals he has resorted to teaching the classics. A progressive young man revisits his birthplace to bury his grandmother. A woman appeals to the officials in a divorce and finds matters have already been resolved. The small minded people gossip and criticize breaks with tradition. Lu's stories involve a return home from city to village, metaphors of future and past.
'Old Stories Retold' requires knowledge of Chinese folklore and mythology and is less accessible. Other parts of this book are provocative and iconoclastic. The introduction and translation by Julia Lovell, history professor at the University of London, are excellent. She has also written books on the Great Wall, Opium War and Maoism. Lu was considered for a Nobel Prize in 1927 and is regarded as one of Asia's greatest modern writers. He had the vision to question age old ways.
"The raucous chorus would begin once more: 'Stealing again?' Kong Yiji's eyes would bulge with outrage: 'Stealing books is no crime! Is scholarship theft?' He would argue back illustrating his point with a perplexing smatter of archaisms: 'Poverty and learning, oft twixt by jowl!' at which everyone in the tavern would collapse with mirth." - Kong Yiji
"Ah-Q began to say out loud what at first he only thought. In this way his tormentors learned of his habit of declaring moral victory over the ashes of defeat. While yanking on his ponytail they went on to give his head the time honored bashing against the nearest hard surface, their hearts again singing with the joys of victory." - The Real Story of Ah-Q
"There are some victors who delight only in victory against worthy adversaries, to whom the conquest of the weak or stupid is as dust or ashes in their mouths. This was not a weakness to which Ah-Q in his inexhaustable delight with himself was susceptible, perhaps living proof of the global superiority of Chinese civilization." - The Real Story of Ah-Q
**
Lu Xun was China's seminal modern writer during the early 20th century. He came from a formerly wealthy family fallen into debt from civil service and legal system bribery. In 1902 Lu pursued a western style medical education in Japan but decided literature could do more to modernize China. After WWI the Versailles treaty awarded Japan Chinese territory protests sparked a New Culture Movement, with science and democracy promoted over the traditional Confucian system.
Lu published three books of short stories in his life, Outcry (1923), Hesitation (1926) and Old Stories Retold (1935). He employed irony and satire to expose ignorance in the lower classes and hypocrisy in the upper. Mao posthumously co-opted him as a hero of the revolution, replacing complex prose with simple propaganda of socialist realism. Lu was a poet, essayist and translator of European literature. All thirty four stories he wrote are included in this collection.
In 'Outcry' a madman suspects cannibalism in his family and village, an indigent scholar who steals books has his legs broken, a father buys medicine made from the blood of an executed revolutionary. A widow squanders her savings on a folk doctor and funeral director, a rickshaw puller helping an injured pedestrian incurs the wrath of his passenger. The politics of Qing and Republican hair styles are revisited. Lu's stories illustrate problems caused by attitudes of people.
The title 'Real Story of Ah-Q' is a cringe inducing portrait of a loser convinced of his own excellence in the face of others contempt. He boasts descent from illustrious ancestors who disown him. He scorns the students of westernized schools as fake foreign devils and persecutes his lessers. Concerned to leave no heir he assaults his employer's maid, cast out he turns to crime. As the Republican revolution approaches he sees his opportunity to wreak vengeance upon the villagers.
In 'Hesitation' a beggar's life of misfortune is told on the New Year, an encounter with an old friend reveals he has resorted to teaching the classics. A progressive young man revisits his birthplace to bury his grandmother. A woman appeals to the officials in a divorce and finds matters have already been resolved. The small minded people gossip and criticize breaks with tradition. Lu's stories involve a return home from city to village, metaphors of future and past.
'Old Stories Retold' requires knowledge of Chinese folklore and mythology and is less accessible. Other parts of this book are provocative and iconoclastic. The introduction and translation by Julia Lovell, history professor at the University of London, are excellent. She has also written books on the Great Wall, Opium War and Maoism. Lu was considered for a Nobel Prize in 1927 and is regarded as one of Asia's greatest modern writers. He had the vision to question age old ways.
June 19, 2018
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction & Notes, by Julia Lovell
Further Reading
A Note on the Translation
A Note on Chinese Names and Pronunciation
--Nostalgia
Outcry
Preface
--Diary of a Madman
--Kong Yiji
--Medicine
--Tomorrow
--A Minor Incident
--Hair
--A Passing Storm
--My Old Home
--The Real Story of Ah-Q
--Dragon Boat Festival
--The White Light
--A Cat among the Rabbits
--A Comedy of Ducks
--Village Opera
Hesitation
--New Year's Sacrifice
--Upstairs in the Tavern
--A Happy Family
--Soap
--The Lamp of Eternity
--A Public Example
--Our Learned Friend
--The Loner
--In Memoriam
--Brothers
--The Divorce
Old Stories Retold
Preface
--Mending Heaven
--Flight to the Moon
--Taming the Floods
--Gathering Ferns
--Forging the Swords
--Leaving the Pass
--Anti-Aggression
--Bringing Back the Dead
Notes
Afterword, by Yiyun Li
Chronology
Introduction & Notes, by Julia Lovell
Further Reading
A Note on the Translation
A Note on Chinese Names and Pronunciation
--Nostalgia
Outcry
Preface
--Diary of a Madman
--Kong Yiji
--Medicine
--Tomorrow
--A Minor Incident
--Hair
--A Passing Storm
--My Old Home
--The Real Story of Ah-Q
--Dragon Boat Festival
--The White Light
--A Cat among the Rabbits
--A Comedy of Ducks
--Village Opera
Hesitation
--New Year's Sacrifice
--Upstairs in the Tavern
--A Happy Family
--Soap
--The Lamp of Eternity
--A Public Example
--Our Learned Friend
--The Loner
--In Memoriam
--Brothers
--The Divorce
Old Stories Retold
Preface
--Mending Heaven
--Flight to the Moon
--Taming the Floods
--Gathering Ferns
--Forging the Swords
--Leaving the Pass
--Anti-Aggression
--Bringing Back the Dead
Notes
Afterword, by Yiyun Li
June 9, 2024
One of the best short story collections I have read. Lu Xun's stories are important. It was his mission to help improve China, or rather to help the lot of the common man and woman, to the best of his ability as a writer (how much any writer can impact on society is still a much-debated question). At the time he was writing, China was undergoing a series of extreme upheavals: rebellions, invasions, feudal rule by warlords, the rise of communism and nationalism, civil war, the overturning of an imperial system that had been in place for millennia.
This volume collects all of Lu Xun's fiction. There are three story collections entire and one early story ('Nostalgia') that wasn't collected into a book during his lifetime. OUTCRY, HESITATION and OLD STORIES RETOLD are the three story collections that form the basis of this Penguin volume. The first two are stories about contemporary China: they use irony and satire to criticize both the ignorance of the people and those in charge (often equally as ignorant) who exploit such ignorance for their own ends. Lu Xun walks a very hazardous tightrope, never quite revealing whether he believes himself to be part of the ignorant masses himself or not. It's a perfect balancing act: he is able to satirize with authority but without appearing condescending. The third collection is a set of fantasy stories that are both delightful and irrelevant.
A few years ago I discovered the stories of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, also in a Penguin volume. I wanted more of the same. The Chinese Lu Xun seems to be almost a kindred spirit to the Japanese Akutagawa. They lived at the same time; they experimented both with realism and fantasy. In conciseness of language and tone, I have found the brilliant Lu Xun to be a wonderful companion to the brilliant Akutagawa, despite any differences in aims and objectives that may exist.
This volume collects all of Lu Xun's fiction. There are three story collections entire and one early story ('Nostalgia') that wasn't collected into a book during his lifetime. OUTCRY, HESITATION and OLD STORIES RETOLD are the three story collections that form the basis of this Penguin volume. The first two are stories about contemporary China: they use irony and satire to criticize both the ignorance of the people and those in charge (often equally as ignorant) who exploit such ignorance for their own ends. Lu Xun walks a very hazardous tightrope, never quite revealing whether he believes himself to be part of the ignorant masses himself or not. It's a perfect balancing act: he is able to satirize with authority but without appearing condescending. The third collection is a set of fantasy stories that are both delightful and irrelevant.
A few years ago I discovered the stories of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, also in a Penguin volume. I wanted more of the same. The Chinese Lu Xun seems to be almost a kindred spirit to the Japanese Akutagawa. They lived at the same time; they experimented both with realism and fantasy. In conciseness of language and tone, I have found the brilliant Lu Xun to be a wonderful companion to the brilliant Akutagawa, despite any differences in aims and objectives that may exist.
March 19, 2014
Asking myself why I hadn't read Lu Xun earlier when I knew he was highly praised and a must-read. He seems to be to China what Natsume Soseki is to Japan. He lived during a time of great social and political change, the Qing dynasty had been toppled and the republic proclaimed, many of his stories deal with this. Some are funny and satirical, others are just sad and gut wrenching.
One story that I found really good dealt with a father trying to take care of his sick son, trying to find ingredients/medicine for him. Lu Xun tells us his views on this and other ancient beliefs. His father had died after being treated with traditional chinese medicine, the toxic concoctions poisoned him.
One story that I found really good dealt with a father trying to take care of his sick son, trying to find ingredients/medicine for him. Lu Xun tells us his views on this and other ancient beliefs. His father had died after being treated with traditional chinese medicine, the toxic concoctions poisoned him.
September 8, 2018
There is no need to share Yiyun Li's bizarre distaste for Lu Xun's rejection of fate (413) in her postface, in order to grasp her problems with his fiction: this self-appointed cultural doctor of modern China delivers a diagnosis of his nation's past and present ailments, but fail (for all his much vaunted leftism) to offer or even suggest any medication:
The poor are stupid and mean, the rich are vain and selfish, and in between a whole cast of ponderous Confucian fools, of half-baked modern women or of bitter, blind and brutal elders, persecute with all the complacent diligence of tradition, a few victims too weak or naive to grasp how the game is to be played.
This is an convenient posture, widespread in fin-de-siècle Europe, and generally excused (by , for example) with a self-serving "Qui aime bien ch?tie bien". At any rate, snide satire aside, Lu Xun is not stricto sensu a modernist, at least not in the Western sense: his episodic novella 'The True Story of Ah Q' was deemed revolutionary when it appeared at the close of 1921, because it was written in vernacular Chinese, rather than because of any subjectivist or experimental parti pris. However much I like the idea of a post-colonial modernism (with its promises of abundant modernities and attending modernist reactions) I think that Western labels never fit too well with texts (Iqbal, Senghor, etc.) endeavouring to catch-up with centuries of perceived Western headway toward an elusive 'modernity'. Lu Xun, for example, is China's Chateaubriand, Balzac and Joyce rolled into one - which is to say that Lu Xun is Lu Xun.
The two best known of his stories are 'The Diary of a Madman', and the aforementioned 'The True Story of Ah Q' (79-123). Ah-Q in fact has become a stock character of modern Chinese culture, somewhat like Mme Bovary in Europe (and ). His story is that of a village idiot, Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, and his twin strategies to assuage the perpetual humiliation visited upon him by the local pecking order. The first manoeuvre is to convince himself of his moral superiority, recasting each of his discomfitures into a spiritual victory (again, this reminds me of reaction to ). The second is to victimize each and everyone below him in the village's hierarchy. In those terms, the story seem bleaker than it actually is: Lu Xun offers no dostoevskian katabasis to psychological hell, but a sardonic vignette with occasional bouts of slapstick humor. I probably lack much of the cultural background to appreciate every reference and echo, but I found it a little underwhelming.
'The Diary of a Madman' (21-31) is more appealing, built as it is on a well-trodden trope of the lunatic's journal. The unnamed narrator, the educated son of a wealthy rural family, slides into paranoia, convinced that his village has relapsed into cannibalism. The laughter of children, the concerned look of his neighbour, the caring of his family, all appear invariably as clues to a darker design. Cannibalism, I start to suspect, plays a peculiar role in classical Chinese culture (even more there than elsewhere). Here is the 4th century b.c.e. Confucian Mencius, for example, condemning the two rival 'extremist' schools of Mo Zi and Yang Zhu:
Cannibalism seems the Chinese bellum omnium contra omnes that buttresses the mostly conservative ritual order of Confucianism: though at first I thought that cannibalism was a metaphor for the self-seeking bourgeoisie of the warlord era, in light of Lu Xun's far more committed rejection of Qing and Confucian values and traditions, I now lean toward a more convoluted interpretation. It might however be precisely this departure from straightforward didacticism that make this story quite compelling.
Here as in the rest of the book, rural life and village culture plays a central role. I was glad to find such vivacious and colourful illustration of a period I knew little about, and which it is difficult for the Westerner to picture. However my favourite stories are those, in Lu Xun's second collection 'Hesitation', that often abandon the easy effects of the rustic burlesque (which I suspect to be nearly as foreign to his urbane audience as to us) in favour of more reflexive and inventive sketches.
Take 'A happy family' (188-194) for example: the story opens on a writer's lofty (if laborious) declaration as to the infinite duties and immortal dignity of the writer. The lucubration is cut short, however, by the actual writer's most earthly concern: put fire in his stove, food on his table, his wife out of his study and his family at peace. That whole ponderous business he was writing was merely a misguided attempt at giving the public what it seeks, and is swiftly abandoned in favour of a more straight-forward and satisfying vignette, describing the day to day life of a modern and successful family in a large town. As the vignette unfolds, interspersed with the writer's reflections and the events that surround him, it becomes clear that the romanticized wish-fulfilment he peddles to his readers under the guise of modernity, is at least as much an escape of his own mediocre existence as it is escapism for his readership.
A similar theme returns, albeit in a different key, with 'In Memoriam' (254-274) : the narrator recalls his affair love and life with a Chinese Neue Frau, who courageously flee a wealthy but oppressive and authoritarian family to live with him. Whereas in 'A happy family' the real keeps intruding into the fiction and its writing process, here the writer fails continuously to find employment or to live up to his dream. Their bohème, however, ne voulait pas dire 'on est heureux' - in fact, Zijun, whom the narrator admired so much, becomes increasingly prosaic and mediocre as time passes, caught as she is in the narrowness of a life of poverty, without the promises and fresh air of literature. This short-story is a harsh, full-frontal look at falling out of love, with its mixture of guilt and disgust, of spite and self-hatred. The dire consequences, for women of this era, of the disembedding of love from marriage is also gestured toward, though Lu Xun wisely refrain from passing a judgement. He also wrote an essay titled which I would like to read.
In the same collection, 'The Loner' (232-253) is also particularly striking, with its psychological finesse and its Russian mood, full of very unexpected twists and turns, eventually leading to "a fate worse than death".
There are at least two Lu Xun: that of the village, and that of the bohème. As the story of the PCF and its writers makes abundantly clear, there were many bridges between the two, but when Lu Xun writes of the hinterland, his characters owe more to the Commedia del'Arte (or Beijing Opera, for that matter) than to the depths and insights of his more urban portraits. He might have been aware of this, as he attempts to balance this popular character with a large dose of acerbic cynicism, which replaces the melancholic sympathy he has for his starving bohemians. Though the snapshots of pastoral China are interesting in their own right, the vitriol and the burlesque fail to live up to the author's project.
The book is an accessible foray into Chinese literature, and will be of interest to anyone curious of Chinese history, the place of tradition in that seemingly most modern of civilisation, as well as those interested in the spread and transformation of European cultural models around the world. I'm afraid I cannot vouch for its literary merits, though, which might be more self-evident in the original, but were, in translation, never striking.
The poor are stupid and mean, the rich are vain and selfish, and in between a whole cast of ponderous Confucian fools, of half-baked modern women or of bitter, blind and brutal elders, persecute with all the complacent diligence of tradition, a few victims too weak or naive to grasp how the game is to be played.
This is an convenient posture, widespread in fin-de-siècle Europe, and generally excused (by , for example) with a self-serving "Qui aime bien ch?tie bien". At any rate, snide satire aside, Lu Xun is not stricto sensu a modernist, at least not in the Western sense: his episodic novella 'The True Story of Ah Q' was deemed revolutionary when it appeared at the close of 1921, because it was written in vernacular Chinese, rather than because of any subjectivist or experimental parti pris. However much I like the idea of a post-colonial modernism (with its promises of abundant modernities and attending modernist reactions) I think that Western labels never fit too well with texts (Iqbal, Senghor, etc.) endeavouring to catch-up with centuries of perceived Western headway toward an elusive 'modernity'. Lu Xun, for example, is China's Chateaubriand, Balzac and Joyce rolled into one - which is to say that Lu Xun is Lu Xun.
The two best known of his stories are 'The Diary of a Madman', and the aforementioned 'The True Story of Ah Q' (79-123). Ah-Q in fact has become a stock character of modern Chinese culture, somewhat like Mme Bovary in Europe (and ). His story is that of a village idiot, Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, and his twin strategies to assuage the perpetual humiliation visited upon him by the local pecking order. The first manoeuvre is to convince himself of his moral superiority, recasting each of his discomfitures into a spiritual victory (again, this reminds me of reaction to ). The second is to victimize each and everyone below him in the village's hierarchy. In those terms, the story seem bleaker than it actually is: Lu Xun offers no dostoevskian katabasis to psychological hell, but a sardonic vignette with occasional bouts of slapstick humor. I probably lack much of the cultural background to appreciate every reference and echo, but I found it a little underwhelming.
'The Diary of a Madman' (21-31) is more appealing, built as it is on a well-trodden trope of the lunatic's journal. The unnamed narrator, the educated son of a wealthy rural family, slides into paranoia, convinced that his village has relapsed into cannibalism. The laughter of children, the concerned look of his neighbour, the caring of his family, all appear invariably as clues to a darker design. Cannibalism, I start to suspect, plays a peculiar role in classical Chinese culture (even more there than elsewhere). Here is the 4th century b.c.e. Confucian Mencius, for example, condemning the two rival 'extremist' schools of Mo Zi and Yang Zhu:
If the way of Yang and Mo does not subside and the way of Confucius is not proclaimed, the people will be deceived by heresies and the path of morality will be blocked. When the path of morality is blocked, then we show animals the way to devour men, and sooner or later it will come to men devouring men.
Cannibalism seems the Chinese bellum omnium contra omnes that buttresses the mostly conservative ritual order of Confucianism: though at first I thought that cannibalism was a metaphor for the self-seeking bourgeoisie of the warlord era, in light of Lu Xun's far more committed rejection of Qing and Confucian values and traditions, I now lean toward a more convoluted interpretation. It might however be precisely this departure from straightforward didacticism that make this story quite compelling.
Here as in the rest of the book, rural life and village culture plays a central role. I was glad to find such vivacious and colourful illustration of a period I knew little about, and which it is difficult for the Westerner to picture. However my favourite stories are those, in Lu Xun's second collection 'Hesitation', that often abandon the easy effects of the rustic burlesque (which I suspect to be nearly as foreign to his urbane audience as to us) in favour of more reflexive and inventive sketches.
Take 'A happy family' (188-194) for example: the story opens on a writer's lofty (if laborious) declaration as to the infinite duties and immortal dignity of the writer. The lucubration is cut short, however, by the actual writer's most earthly concern: put fire in his stove, food on his table, his wife out of his study and his family at peace. That whole ponderous business he was writing was merely a misguided attempt at giving the public what it seeks, and is swiftly abandoned in favour of a more straight-forward and satisfying vignette, describing the day to day life of a modern and successful family in a large town. As the vignette unfolds, interspersed with the writer's reflections and the events that surround him, it becomes clear that the romanticized wish-fulfilment he peddles to his readers under the guise of modernity, is at least as much an escape of his own mediocre existence as it is escapism for his readership.
A similar theme returns, albeit in a different key, with 'In Memoriam' (254-274) : the narrator recalls his affair love and life with a Chinese Neue Frau, who courageously flee a wealthy but oppressive and authoritarian family to live with him. Whereas in 'A happy family' the real keeps intruding into the fiction and its writing process, here the writer fails continuously to find employment or to live up to his dream. Their bohème, however, ne voulait pas dire 'on est heureux' - in fact, Zijun, whom the narrator admired so much, becomes increasingly prosaic and mediocre as time passes, caught as she is in the narrowness of a life of poverty, without the promises and fresh air of literature. This short-story is a harsh, full-frontal look at falling out of love, with its mixture of guilt and disgust, of spite and self-hatred. The dire consequences, for women of this era, of the disembedding of love from marriage is also gestured toward, though Lu Xun wisely refrain from passing a judgement. He also wrote an essay titled which I would like to read.
In the same collection, 'The Loner' (232-253) is also particularly striking, with its psychological finesse and its Russian mood, full of very unexpected twists and turns, eventually leading to "a fate worse than death".
There are at least two Lu Xun: that of the village, and that of the bohème. As the story of the PCF and its writers makes abundantly clear, there were many bridges between the two, but when Lu Xun writes of the hinterland, his characters owe more to the Commedia del'Arte (or Beijing Opera, for that matter) than to the depths and insights of his more urban portraits. He might have been aware of this, as he attempts to balance this popular character with a large dose of acerbic cynicism, which replaces the melancholic sympathy he has for his starving bohemians. Though the snapshots of pastoral China are interesting in their own right, the vitriol and the burlesque fail to live up to the author's project.
The book is an accessible foray into Chinese literature, and will be of interest to anyone curious of Chinese history, the place of tradition in that seemingly most modern of civilisation, as well as those interested in the spread and transformation of European cultural models around the world. I'm afraid I cannot vouch for its literary merits, though, which might be more self-evident in the original, but were, in translation, never striking.
July 13, 2022
Lu Xun's writings are a singular example of how freedom in China might have developed after the communist revolution in Russia introduced communism in China ... but of course this is not the way it went ... Lu's writings about cannibalism, which I see as a metaphor for dictatorship ... are included in the draft of my new novel-in-process comparing freedom in the U.S. and China
December 30, 2024
Thought-provoking and very sad short stories about China at the turn of the century. The introduction added a lot to the reading experience, and I highly recommend reading it at some point (maybe afterwards to avoid spoilers). I didn't quite make it through the legend retellings at the end - without knowing the originals, they are hard to follow. That would make this edition a little better, if it had a synopsis of the original tale before Lu Xun's version.
February 23, 2020
3.50-star
I admired and enjoyed reading his "Leaving the Pass" and "Anti-Aggression" since the author subtly characterized those Chinese sages and, I think, Lu Xun's outstanding and exceptional style has long established his brilliance as second to none. For instance:
...
'Do I find you well, master?' Confucius said, saluting him reverently.
'As ever,' Laozi answered. 'It's been a while. You have been burying yourself in books, no doubt?'
'Dabbling, merely dabbling,' Confucius said modestly. ... (pp. 373-4)
Therefore, Dear 欧宝娱乐 friends, we're stlll dabbling like the great sage.
I admired and enjoyed reading his "Leaving the Pass" and "Anti-Aggression" since the author subtly characterized those Chinese sages and, I think, Lu Xun's outstanding and exceptional style has long established his brilliance as second to none. For instance:
...
'Do I find you well, master?' Confucius said, saluting him reverently.
'As ever,' Laozi answered. 'It's been a while. You have been burying yourself in books, no doubt?'
'Dabbling, merely dabbling,' Confucius said modestly. ... (pp. 373-4)
Therefore, Dear 欧宝娱乐 friends, we're stlll dabbling like the great sage.
February 6, 2014
Even strongly ideological authors know that in order to reach a popular audience, their political ideas have to be layered underneath palatable narratives and relatable characters. Great writers like Steinbeck or Zola did this well; the mark of hacks like Ayn Rand is their inability to let their messages flow smoothly from the story and to say what they mean without shouting at the reader. Lu Xun set himself a real challenge with his work here - short stories can be an even more difficult medium than novels to make political points, just because each story has to spend proportionately more time on character development and so forth. Not that it's impossible - Varlam Shalamov's short stories in Kolyma Tales are in a way far more effective at conveying the grim brutality of the gulag system than Solzhenitsyn's more famous works precisely because Shalamov's points seem to emerge from the stories far more organically - but often the author has to hope that it's the subtle shared connections between stories that make the difference rather than any single moment within an individual story, the overall themes emerging in the manner of the rhythm of the clacking wheels of a train on a long journey.
Lu's efforts succeed here in exactly that way, the cumulative effects growing stronger with each story. He wrote these stories in the 1910s and 20s as China was taking some halfhearted steps to awaken itself from its centuries-long torpor, and lurking in the background of just about every one of them are some consistent themes: the gargantuan ineptitude of government bureaucracy, the humiliating obsequiousness of the powerless towards the powerful, the pathetic poverty of village life, the absurdities of slavish devotion to Confucianism, the suffocating incuriosity of the Chinese people, and the necessity of radical changes at all levels of society if China were to ever start addressing them. I always respect authors who are willing to make bold criticisms of their own societies, because nothing is artistically easier or more temptingly lucrative than to simply give people what's familiar and flattering to their own prejudices. But these short stories, which are often very funny in their amused chronicling of universal human foibles, are incredibly uncomplimentary to basically every aspect of what at the time was a catatonic and stagnant culture, and Lu deserves real credit for his Nikolai Gogol-esque portraits that are instantly relatable even as they depict people at their worst and least likable.
The Penguin Classics edition I have groups three different short story collections together: Outcry, Hesitation, and Old Stories Retold, with the title story halfway through the first collection. Each tale has innumerable tiny details that make them feel much larger than their actual half-dozen-ish pages, odd names like "Seven-Pounds" and loving descriptions of dirt and filth giving the impression that the reader is peering in at a succession of tiny fishbowls, the characters stuck swimming in tiny circles like firmly oppressed goldfish. Sometimes the townsfolk suffer crushing tragedies, sometimes minor misfortunes; Lu always finds a way to keep focus on the "idiocy of rural life", and yet he never puts any polemics or multi-page rants on the page, merely gentle irony at how funny all this senselessness is.
Ah-Q's story itself is one of the best examples. Its eponymous hero is an Ignatius P. Reilly-type loser who suffers endless humiliations yet always finds "moral victories" at the end of each one. He does menial odd jobs throughout town, always messing things up while thinking himself far above whatever he's doing, leaping from blunder to blunder and desperately searching for people even weaker than he is to bully so he can feel better about himself, until he has a final encounter with the authorities that he can't cringe his way out of. Apparently Marxists had a complicated relationship with the part where Ah-Q decides to be a revolutionary but then sleeps through his chance to join them; I personally thought that his poor luck there was a perfect complement to his general cowardice. "Village Opera" is another one of my favorites from the first collection for the way it folds a funny criticism of Chinese opera into an evocative example of childhood nostalgia, or "A Small Incident", where a man involved in a rickshaw accident ponders his own callousness and willingness to (literally) trample over other people to get where he needs to.
The stories are even stronger in Hesitation, the second collection, I think because Lu had gotten more experienced but also because they're slightly longer and give him more room to work in. "The Loner" is a long and moving look at a curiously arms-length friendship "bracketed at its beginning and end by funerals", with both the narrator and his somewhat distant friend's lives going through ups and down of fortune until fate decides to taketh away from the friend as surely as it had giveth to him. It's quite sad, but the next one, "In Memoriam", is by far the saddest, and possibly the best, of the whole lot. Its depiction of the breakdown of two people's love and "poor but happy" marriage under the stresses of their terrible poverty and the weight of society's outdated norms is heartbreaking. But Lu is also able to throw in hilarious bits like the guy in "The Divorce" who's trying to sell "an 'anus-stopper': used by the ancients in burials, to stop up the anus of the deceased", which keeps the whole thing from getting too gloomy.
Interestingly, the preface to the 30s-era third collection "Old Stories Retold" mentions that it took by far the longest to write. It's a mixture of retellings of well-known episodes from Chinese mythology with historical fiction vignettes. One of the best moments is at the end of "Gathering Ferns", where a woman, who had inadvertently caused the starvation deaths of two brothers who were on a sort of hunger strike against a king they disliked, tells a made-up story about a magic deer they had offended to the other townspeople to absolve herself of blame: "'Heaven was so disgusted by their greed, he told the roe deer to stop coming. They deserved to starve! I had nothing to do with it - they brought it on themselves, the greedy wretches.' Her audiences always sighed as she concluded her story – the worry lifting from their bodies. Now, if ever they thought of the brothers, they were hazy figures, squatted at the foot of a cliff, their white-bearded mouths gaping open to devour the deer." It's a great example of the desperate urge to avoid responsibility people have, and how eager we all are to swallow anything as long as it has a moral that fits our prejudices.
The collection and the book closes with "Bringing Back the Dead", a funny sendup of Daoism which wryly recasts the myth of Job as a joking discussion between philosopher Zhuangzi and the God of Fate that ends with a very confused, helpless resurrected corpse. I was struck by the irony of Lu spending all this time writing about China's religious heritage and symbols of the past when his main literary goal had been to show how absurd China's decadence and stagnation was, but I suppose it makes sense that only someone who really loved the country, senile mythology, ideology, and all, could have had the proper perspective to write such scathing takedowns of its effects on people. To use an American example, it reminded me a bit of the story of the Duke and the Dauphin in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, where only someone who actually cared about the country could make a story of people's ignorance and gullibility so affectionate and amusing. It's easy to see why later reformers and revolutionaries liked his work so much, but though it's unfortunate that this book contains essentially all the fiction he ever wrote since it means there's not any more to read, there's enough great material in here to shame plenty of lesser authors who wrote far more.
Lu's efforts succeed here in exactly that way, the cumulative effects growing stronger with each story. He wrote these stories in the 1910s and 20s as China was taking some halfhearted steps to awaken itself from its centuries-long torpor, and lurking in the background of just about every one of them are some consistent themes: the gargantuan ineptitude of government bureaucracy, the humiliating obsequiousness of the powerless towards the powerful, the pathetic poverty of village life, the absurdities of slavish devotion to Confucianism, the suffocating incuriosity of the Chinese people, and the necessity of radical changes at all levels of society if China were to ever start addressing them. I always respect authors who are willing to make bold criticisms of their own societies, because nothing is artistically easier or more temptingly lucrative than to simply give people what's familiar and flattering to their own prejudices. But these short stories, which are often very funny in their amused chronicling of universal human foibles, are incredibly uncomplimentary to basically every aspect of what at the time was a catatonic and stagnant culture, and Lu deserves real credit for his Nikolai Gogol-esque portraits that are instantly relatable even as they depict people at their worst and least likable.
The Penguin Classics edition I have groups three different short story collections together: Outcry, Hesitation, and Old Stories Retold, with the title story halfway through the first collection. Each tale has innumerable tiny details that make them feel much larger than their actual half-dozen-ish pages, odd names like "Seven-Pounds" and loving descriptions of dirt and filth giving the impression that the reader is peering in at a succession of tiny fishbowls, the characters stuck swimming in tiny circles like firmly oppressed goldfish. Sometimes the townsfolk suffer crushing tragedies, sometimes minor misfortunes; Lu always finds a way to keep focus on the "idiocy of rural life", and yet he never puts any polemics or multi-page rants on the page, merely gentle irony at how funny all this senselessness is.
Ah-Q's story itself is one of the best examples. Its eponymous hero is an Ignatius P. Reilly-type loser who suffers endless humiliations yet always finds "moral victories" at the end of each one. He does menial odd jobs throughout town, always messing things up while thinking himself far above whatever he's doing, leaping from blunder to blunder and desperately searching for people even weaker than he is to bully so he can feel better about himself, until he has a final encounter with the authorities that he can't cringe his way out of. Apparently Marxists had a complicated relationship with the part where Ah-Q decides to be a revolutionary but then sleeps through his chance to join them; I personally thought that his poor luck there was a perfect complement to his general cowardice. "Village Opera" is another one of my favorites from the first collection for the way it folds a funny criticism of Chinese opera into an evocative example of childhood nostalgia, or "A Small Incident", where a man involved in a rickshaw accident ponders his own callousness and willingness to (literally) trample over other people to get where he needs to.
The stories are even stronger in Hesitation, the second collection, I think because Lu had gotten more experienced but also because they're slightly longer and give him more room to work in. "The Loner" is a long and moving look at a curiously arms-length friendship "bracketed at its beginning and end by funerals", with both the narrator and his somewhat distant friend's lives going through ups and down of fortune until fate decides to taketh away from the friend as surely as it had giveth to him. It's quite sad, but the next one, "In Memoriam", is by far the saddest, and possibly the best, of the whole lot. Its depiction of the breakdown of two people's love and "poor but happy" marriage under the stresses of their terrible poverty and the weight of society's outdated norms is heartbreaking. But Lu is also able to throw in hilarious bits like the guy in "The Divorce" who's trying to sell "an 'anus-stopper': used by the ancients in burials, to stop up the anus of the deceased", which keeps the whole thing from getting too gloomy.
Interestingly, the preface to the 30s-era third collection "Old Stories Retold" mentions that it took by far the longest to write. It's a mixture of retellings of well-known episodes from Chinese mythology with historical fiction vignettes. One of the best moments is at the end of "Gathering Ferns", where a woman, who had inadvertently caused the starvation deaths of two brothers who were on a sort of hunger strike against a king they disliked, tells a made-up story about a magic deer they had offended to the other townspeople to absolve herself of blame: "'Heaven was so disgusted by their greed, he told the roe deer to stop coming. They deserved to starve! I had nothing to do with it - they brought it on themselves, the greedy wretches.' Her audiences always sighed as she concluded her story – the worry lifting from their bodies. Now, if ever they thought of the brothers, they were hazy figures, squatted at the foot of a cliff, their white-bearded mouths gaping open to devour the deer." It's a great example of the desperate urge to avoid responsibility people have, and how eager we all are to swallow anything as long as it has a moral that fits our prejudices.
The collection and the book closes with "Bringing Back the Dead", a funny sendup of Daoism which wryly recasts the myth of Job as a joking discussion between philosopher Zhuangzi and the God of Fate that ends with a very confused, helpless resurrected corpse. I was struck by the irony of Lu spending all this time writing about China's religious heritage and symbols of the past when his main literary goal had been to show how absurd China's decadence and stagnation was, but I suppose it makes sense that only someone who really loved the country, senile mythology, ideology, and all, could have had the proper perspective to write such scathing takedowns of its effects on people. To use an American example, it reminded me a bit of the story of the Duke and the Dauphin in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, where only someone who actually cared about the country could make a story of people's ignorance and gullibility so affectionate and amusing. It's easy to see why later reformers and revolutionaries liked his work so much, but though it's unfortunate that this book contains essentially all the fiction he ever wrote since it means there's not any more to read, there's enough great material in here to shame plenty of lesser authors who wrote far more.
April 2, 2025
Great read! The stories managed to capture the frailty of the human condition so well.
I expected ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’ to be the highlight but so many other stories stood out.
My Old Home was my favourite. I could relate to it. Nostalgic..
“Through a crack in the awning, I could see a bleak scattering of villages beneath a dull yellow sky. A powerful sense of desolation welled up in me.
Was this the place I had kept nostalgically alive in my thoughts these past two decades?”
“Maybe it had always been like this, I told myself. Even though time had not been kind to it, it was surely not as bleak as it now struck me. It was I who had changed, I reasoned; grown melancholy.”
“Hope, I thought to myself, is an intangible presence that can neither be affirmed nor denied – a path that exists only where others have already passed.”
New Year’s Sacrifice
“Perhaps it hadn’t yet dawned on her that her sorrow, having been chewed deliciously for so long, had now been reduced to dregs, to be spat out in disgust. But even she could read the mockery in their smiles, comprehending that no response was required, beyond a silent glance across at them.”
A Happy Family
The Loner
“You’re wrong. Children aren’t bad, like adults; they’re incapable of it. It’s only later they become bad like you say – and that’s all down to environment. It’s nurture, not nature – they start out well. They’re China’s only hope.”
In Memoriam
“Truth is a luxury not everyone can afford; to Zijun, it had brought only desolation. Lies bring their own hollowness, but they do not oppress like the truth.”
Mending Heaven
Flight to the Moon
Quotes
“Not long after the sentimental cadences from next door died away, the darkness began to pale over to the east, and the first, hopeful silver light of dawn crept in through a crack in the window, drawing the short summer night to a close.”
“I remember, when I was a boy, laughing at bees and flies when they returned to settle on a place they’d just been frightened off, after making the tiniest tour of avoidance. Pathetic. And here I am, doing exactly the same thing. Now you, too. Couldn’t you have flown a bit further away?”
“In my laughably humble opinion, promoting women’s education is in step with the way of progress and the modern world, but you have to stop things getting out of hand. ”
“Dying is all right in its way – but it’s not the easiest thing in the world; especially if you want to do some good by it.”
I expected ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’ to be the highlight but so many other stories stood out.
My Old Home was my favourite. I could relate to it. Nostalgic..
“Through a crack in the awning, I could see a bleak scattering of villages beneath a dull yellow sky. A powerful sense of desolation welled up in me.
Was this the place I had kept nostalgically alive in my thoughts these past two decades?”
“Maybe it had always been like this, I told myself. Even though time had not been kind to it, it was surely not as bleak as it now struck me. It was I who had changed, I reasoned; grown melancholy.”
“Hope, I thought to myself, is an intangible presence that can neither be affirmed nor denied – a path that exists only where others have already passed.”
New Year’s Sacrifice
“Perhaps it hadn’t yet dawned on her that her sorrow, having been chewed deliciously for so long, had now been reduced to dregs, to be spat out in disgust. But even she could read the mockery in their smiles, comprehending that no response was required, beyond a silent glance across at them.”
A Happy Family
The Loner
“You’re wrong. Children aren’t bad, like adults; they’re incapable of it. It’s only later they become bad like you say – and that’s all down to environment. It’s nurture, not nature – they start out well. They’re China’s only hope.”
In Memoriam
“Truth is a luxury not everyone can afford; to Zijun, it had brought only desolation. Lies bring their own hollowness, but they do not oppress like the truth.”
Mending Heaven
Flight to the Moon
Quotes
“Not long after the sentimental cadences from next door died away, the darkness began to pale over to the east, and the first, hopeful silver light of dawn crept in through a crack in the window, drawing the short summer night to a close.”
“I remember, when I was a boy, laughing at bees and flies when they returned to settle on a place they’d just been frightened off, after making the tiniest tour of avoidance. Pathetic. And here I am, doing exactly the same thing. Now you, too. Couldn’t you have flown a bit further away?”
“In my laughably humble opinion, promoting women’s education is in step with the way of progress and the modern world, but you have to stop things getting out of hand. ”
“Dying is all right in its way – but it’s not the easiest thing in the world; especially if you want to do some good by it.”
May 6, 2013
ISBN: 9780140455489
The complete fiction of Lu Xun (real name Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936) beginning with a short stand alone story Nostalgia followed by Outcry, 1923 (14 stories), Hesitation, 1926 (11 stories) and Old stories retold, 1936 (8 stories).
Stories in Outcry and Hesitation are powerful and magnificent.
Sadly, I'm not familiar with Chinese legends and tales to fully appreciate the story collection Old stories retold but I did like them anyway.
December 28, 2023
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January 15, 2013
This is quite a book. Lu Xun's skill as a storyteller and writer shines through and i cannot help but to be captivated by his stories especially the Real Story of Ah Q which made me laugh at first but then, made me think afterward. His stories are filled with life lessons that can still be useful today.
December 30, 2023
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February 18, 2017
An extraordinary collection of stories.Gave me some tremendous insights into the Chinese psyche.Lu Xun is rightly considered to be the founder of Modern Chinese literature.It was wonderful to have a preface written by Xun himself,where he gives the readers a picture of the Chinese literary and cultural scene.Decades of humiliation wrought by Western powers (mainly through the annexation of territories and unequal treaties) had taken their toll on the morale of the Chinese.Lu Xun was also very critical of traditional Chinese thinking as well as ancient superstitions) which kept them harping on the glorious past of the 'Middle kingdom'.He was heavily influenced by Russian and French writers and wished to put Chinese literature on a modern footing.He would often quote Liang Qichao (the legendary Chinese intellectual who was the architect of social reforms in China that led to the overthrow of the hated imperial rule of the Manchu dynasty (Qing)) "If one intends to renovate the people of a nation,one must first renovate its fiction."None did this with more perfection than Lu.
Chinese literature until then had been largely devoted to mythology,tales of chivalry and flowery romances. Liang Qichao bemoaning the inadequacy of Chinese literature once observed 'Chinese novels teach us either robbery or lust.'Lu Xun transformed all that.In his 'The Real Story of Ah-Q' Xun mercilessly criticizes his fellow countrymen who on one hand are known for their supplication and servility to authority while at the same time show the least remorse in displaying heartless cruelty towards the weak.He identifies certain flaws in the Chinese character and argues for a more universal humanism.I found a lot of similarities between Xun and Tagore in this aspect.The story that moved me the most was his 'The Diary of a Madman'.It is about a man who thinks everyone around him is a cannibal and the Chinese people have been 'eating people' for centuries.He is dismissed by his family and community as a lunatic.However as one gets deeper into the story one realizes that Xun is using a lot of metaphors.It is a critique of China's much vaunted Confucian traditions and Chinese history as also its present deplorable state.It dawns on us that it may be entirely feasible that the only one who is able to see reality for what it truly is happens to be the 'Madman'!The cannibalism the madman talks about is the baseness of human nature where humans continue to exploit each other and how China clings on to past traditions which keeps them stagnant.The prose seemed to possess a power that impacted my thinking in a very deep way.It clearly challenged the established norms of fiction writing.To think that Xun wrote this story in 1918!
Another story that moved me was 'Tomorrow'.This was about an impoverished single mother who lives with a young child.The child passes away after a prolonged illness and the mother tries to cope with his absence. Xun describes the feelings of the mother with such haunting beauty.The room looks so different to her after her son's death.In the desolation of her house she tries hard to sleep.She consoles herself by thinking 'He may come back to me in a dream'.There is pitch darkness outside agitating to become tomorrow's first light.Another story i liked was 'leaving the Pass' featuring the great Chinese thinkers Laozi and Confucius. Laozi is depicted as a wise old thinker whose teachings are not fully understood by people and Confucius is shown as an irritable and impatient,albeit brilliant man.Most people just pay lip service to Laozi's teachings and he decides to leave.Even as he is journeying westwards authorities flock to him demanding one last sermon.Now Laozi is perplexed as he always said 'The Way that can be spoken,is not the eternal Way'.Still he writes a manuscript and leaves.The authorities then read it and one remarks 'It is the same boring stuff.Another quips 'I thought he would write about his love life.More exciting stuff.'So Xun parodies how the Chinese often revere their thinkers in a superficial manner bordering on hypocrisy.
I could go on about all his other stories as well.There was not one among the 30 stories that i did not like.The sheer range of his stories,be it the themes or the characters,truly astounded me.The deep empathy in his stories really touched me. Lu Xun is a great writer who deserves our untrammeled attention. Xun often said that he was constantly battling loneliness all his life (as his outspokenness and non conformist thinking tended to isolate him from the mainstream Chinese intelligentsia and sometimes even from his own family) and the reason he chose to become a writer was '..if only to offer comfort or sympathy to those fighting through their loneliness,and to alleviate their fears of the struggles ahead.' I think he succeeded admirably.
Chinese literature until then had been largely devoted to mythology,tales of chivalry and flowery romances. Liang Qichao bemoaning the inadequacy of Chinese literature once observed 'Chinese novels teach us either robbery or lust.'Lu Xun transformed all that.In his 'The Real Story of Ah-Q' Xun mercilessly criticizes his fellow countrymen who on one hand are known for their supplication and servility to authority while at the same time show the least remorse in displaying heartless cruelty towards the weak.He identifies certain flaws in the Chinese character and argues for a more universal humanism.I found a lot of similarities between Xun and Tagore in this aspect.The story that moved me the most was his 'The Diary of a Madman'.It is about a man who thinks everyone around him is a cannibal and the Chinese people have been 'eating people' for centuries.He is dismissed by his family and community as a lunatic.However as one gets deeper into the story one realizes that Xun is using a lot of metaphors.It is a critique of China's much vaunted Confucian traditions and Chinese history as also its present deplorable state.It dawns on us that it may be entirely feasible that the only one who is able to see reality for what it truly is happens to be the 'Madman'!The cannibalism the madman talks about is the baseness of human nature where humans continue to exploit each other and how China clings on to past traditions which keeps them stagnant.The prose seemed to possess a power that impacted my thinking in a very deep way.It clearly challenged the established norms of fiction writing.To think that Xun wrote this story in 1918!
Another story that moved me was 'Tomorrow'.This was about an impoverished single mother who lives with a young child.The child passes away after a prolonged illness and the mother tries to cope with his absence. Xun describes the feelings of the mother with such haunting beauty.The room looks so different to her after her son's death.In the desolation of her house she tries hard to sleep.She consoles herself by thinking 'He may come back to me in a dream'.There is pitch darkness outside agitating to become tomorrow's first light.Another story i liked was 'leaving the Pass' featuring the great Chinese thinkers Laozi and Confucius. Laozi is depicted as a wise old thinker whose teachings are not fully understood by people and Confucius is shown as an irritable and impatient,albeit brilliant man.Most people just pay lip service to Laozi's teachings and he decides to leave.Even as he is journeying westwards authorities flock to him demanding one last sermon.Now Laozi is perplexed as he always said 'The Way that can be spoken,is not the eternal Way'.Still he writes a manuscript and leaves.The authorities then read it and one remarks 'It is the same boring stuff.Another quips 'I thought he would write about his love life.More exciting stuff.'So Xun parodies how the Chinese often revere their thinkers in a superficial manner bordering on hypocrisy.
I could go on about all his other stories as well.There was not one among the 30 stories that i did not like.The sheer range of his stories,be it the themes or the characters,truly astounded me.The deep empathy in his stories really touched me. Lu Xun is a great writer who deserves our untrammeled attention. Xun often said that he was constantly battling loneliness all his life (as his outspokenness and non conformist thinking tended to isolate him from the mainstream Chinese intelligentsia and sometimes even from his own family) and the reason he chose to become a writer was '..if only to offer comfort or sympathy to those fighting through their loneliness,and to alleviate their fears of the struggles ahead.' I think he succeeded admirably.
November 20, 2017
Lu Xun was a difficult author for me, which is somewhat baffling. He's obviously heavily influenced by Gogol, who is a personal favorite, as well as Checkov, who I also have both enjoyed and found edifying. Other reviewers have compared him to Akutagawa which I think is a somewhat apt comparison. Yet for some reason the majority of these short stories just didn't click with me. Either I was left blank-faced or felt that there was some sort of irony or commentary that I should find biting and funny, or tragic and sad, but just flew over my head.
After reading through reviews, I was able to put my finger on it, namely the most of the time I really wasn't able to connect the words and actions of characters in the story with what was being implicitly commented on. For example, in "Gathering Ferns", the ending where the woman lies about why the two old men died completely eluded me. I had no idea why she would have done so, whereas another reviewer here commented that it was a darkly ironic commentary on her absolving herself of responsibility for what happened to the two men from her teasing and placing it on the men's heads.
Part of it is stylistic, namely that outside of "The Real Story of Ah-Q" and some of the "Old Tales Retold", Xun is very dry in his humor and a bit on the spare side with his prose. He can do rich description, his tale in which the narrator recalls and old childhood friend and the tale in which the narrator recalls visiting a Chinese Opera as a boy are certainly rich with detail. However, he tends to be lean otherwise. The other part of the problem is that I'm not very well acquainted with the conventions of Chinese Literature and Culture, compared to Western and Japanese Literature and Culture. I don't really have a firm grasp on what Xun is trying to criticize in Chinese culture outside of the broadest details supplied by the translator and what I already know in passing.
One thing I have hit older editions of Penguin Classics for is their monster forwards or endless footnotes in which the translator or another scholar essentially gives an analysis of the text in somewhat fine detail. To be honest, this is the first time I could see the utility in that. I'm not embarrassed to say I'd need an expert to hold my hand through each short story. That said, the translator's introduction isn't bad, it's just focused on biographic details and a wider thematic view of Xun's concern's as a writer.
So how to review this? Honestly, I'd like to try to read it again, maybe with another translator who's a bit more flexible regarding style, maybe after reading more modern and classic Chinese Literature and getting a better feel and context. The stories and commentary I *did* get were really quite good, particularly the less bitter ones.
Current review three out of five, but likely to rise with time.
After reading through reviews, I was able to put my finger on it, namely the most of the time I really wasn't able to connect the words and actions of characters in the story with what was being implicitly commented on. For example, in "Gathering Ferns", the ending where the woman lies about why the two old men died completely eluded me. I had no idea why she would have done so, whereas another reviewer here commented that it was a darkly ironic commentary on her absolving herself of responsibility for what happened to the two men from her teasing and placing it on the men's heads.
Part of it is stylistic, namely that outside of "The Real Story of Ah-Q" and some of the "Old Tales Retold", Xun is very dry in his humor and a bit on the spare side with his prose. He can do rich description, his tale in which the narrator recalls and old childhood friend and the tale in which the narrator recalls visiting a Chinese Opera as a boy are certainly rich with detail. However, he tends to be lean otherwise. The other part of the problem is that I'm not very well acquainted with the conventions of Chinese Literature and Culture, compared to Western and Japanese Literature and Culture. I don't really have a firm grasp on what Xun is trying to criticize in Chinese culture outside of the broadest details supplied by the translator and what I already know in passing.
One thing I have hit older editions of Penguin Classics for is their monster forwards or endless footnotes in which the translator or another scholar essentially gives an analysis of the text in somewhat fine detail. To be honest, this is the first time I could see the utility in that. I'm not embarrassed to say I'd need an expert to hold my hand through each short story. That said, the translator's introduction isn't bad, it's just focused on biographic details and a wider thematic view of Xun's concern's as a writer.
So how to review this? Honestly, I'd like to try to read it again, maybe with another translator who's a bit more flexible regarding style, maybe after reading more modern and classic Chinese Literature and getting a better feel and context. The stories and commentary I *did* get were really quite good, particularly the less bitter ones.
Current review three out of five, but likely to rise with time.
July 27, 2016
At first, it seems like a work in line with Russian writers like Gogol, stories of lower class people and the newly-educated generation written with satirical and black comedy tones. But through the eyes of Lu Xun, the many aspects of Late-Qing dynasty China are presented with powerful clarity, the poverty, the beliefs in superstitions and Chinese medicines, the corruptness of society and all the outdated ideas that he belief are keeping China from moving forward.
This book contains three collections of fiction. I find many as an intriguing read, but some are also quite a bore for me, especially the last collection which are retelling of old Chinese tales. The new twists added are of quite a good humor, but still not enough to keep me turning the pages.
And sadly, any translations might not have done Lu Xun justice. As stated in the translator's note, Chinese are very different from English, and it's not easy, if at all impossible, to find an equivalent voice for his style in English.
This book contains three collections of fiction. I find many as an intriguing read, but some are also quite a bore for me, especially the last collection which are retelling of old Chinese tales. The new twists added are of quite a good humor, but still not enough to keep me turning the pages.
And sadly, any translations might not have done Lu Xun justice. As stated in the translator's note, Chinese are very different from English, and it's not easy, if at all impossible, to find an equivalent voice for his style in English.
February 23, 2020
Mocks pettiness, groupthink and superstition. Advocates science and reason as a remedy.
Read
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July 10, 2024
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May 19, 2020
The complete fiction of Lu Xun assembled under the title The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China comprises 26 short stories that evoke the author’s China from the late nineteenth century through the mid-1920s and 8 modern retellings of Chinese legends and myths. The stories show the great wealth of Chinese culture, but also address and criticise ancient traditions to which people keep clinging although they have lost meaning and even prevent China’s modernisation, i.e. her adaptation to the needs of a changed and changing world. The protagonists are ordinary people fighting for survival in the chaos of post-imperial China where nothing is certain and penury is virtually everywhere.
For a long review of this volume of tales of China be invited to read the long review on my book blog Edith’s Miscellany at .
For a long review of this volume of tales of China be invited to read the long review on my book blog Edith’s Miscellany at .
July 31, 2018
Amazing stories, especially The True Story of Ah Q.
Funny and bleak at the same time.
Apart from Chinese scholars it will appeal to everyone who enjoys story with a dark streak.
There are elements of cannibalism, human sacrifice even though you can't call it horror.
Lu Xun may not have been prolific but he deserves the status he has acquired as one of the giants
of modern Chinese literature.
His works have been highly praised by many, such as Mao and Haruki Murakami.
Funny and bleak at the same time.
Apart from Chinese scholars it will appeal to everyone who enjoys story with a dark streak.
There are elements of cannibalism, human sacrifice even though you can't call it horror.
Lu Xun may not have been prolific but he deserves the status he has acquired as one of the giants
of modern Chinese literature.
His works have been highly praised by many, such as Mao and Haruki Murakami.
Want to read
July 20, 2014My mom has rec'd Lu Xun to me several times, usually with the statement of "He just understands." It's about time I get in touch with this guy.
September 4, 2016
Greeeeaaaat
A Novel would be enough as it is.
A Novel would be enough as it is.
September 4, 2018
This is very good. My favourites were: "Upstairs in the Tavern", "The Loner" and "My Old Home."
May 30, 2019
It is uncharitable to judge an author by how they have been used by the people after them, either for what I would praise or condemn, I thought, so I am shelving the fact that Lu Xun has been used by Mao Zedong and his party to further their ideals. I already judge writers for everything else; I squirrel away my low-hanging pretensions to being somewhat morally upright (as if it isn’t majorly through the influence of my social milieu rather than my not being a dick). So that one I’m letting go. You’re welcome, Lu Xun.
So my low-hanging criticism here is that despite the overarching excellence, I found it hard to disregard the fact that in reality the stories were permeated by what he himself calls a battle cry, meant to illustrate China’s issues and point people in the right direction; he had pretensions to being a doctor of the mind, which is grating. I guess him leaning into preaching does shine through and I think it hobbled his art somewhat, or his storytelling talent. I was quite frustrated with it, because his writing truly is so good. Ironically this would have been his saving point if he were an absolutely shit writer, though. Funny how that works.
Everything else for me was an absolute pleasure, I was veritably delighted reading some of those stories, like I got a frisson of pleasure at reading something TRULY excellent, and stormed through them. Those stories stood out for me, some of which are very close to my heart (notable ones for me: My Old Home and The Loner), because they showcase Lu Xun’s extraordinary talent at depicting nostalgia and longing and humanity while also hinting at harrowing class and identity politics being played out in the background. This is some next level writing.
Admittedly some of them I wasn’t able to understand on a deeper level, I’d think because I don’t have a great understanding of that cultural symbolism that was heavily used to transmit the meaning to its audience. To this I’d say fair enough. I assume Lu Xun got more clandestine in his writing as time went on - his third volume, heavily symbolic and inspired by Chinese mythology, was written at a time when many of his friends and colleagues were assassinated by then already corrupt Communist party. It went over my head and didn’t have enough panache for me to disregard that. I’m not mad about it though.
But I want to touch on something that sits with me. Lu Xun is, for me at this time, so excellent because despite us slowly leaning into a sense of community I’m still into individualism. And when his cynicism and self awareness and loneliness shines through, when he’s going full modernism, he’s GOOD. In Memoriam stuck with me. There is a sense of regret and self awareness and selfishness in there that’s tangible (Sometimes, I see life as a long, grey snake, crawling towards me. I wait, and I wait, watching it approach). He’s got a great feminist sensibility in this and other stories. But in his private life he went for the typical ‘perplexing misogyny’ (as Julia Lovell calls it in introduction) when a woman disagreed with something in his life. I find it hard to believe it's isolated. I’m very familiar with that type of empty proselytising but Diane Nguyen said it best so I’m gonna give Lu Xun 4 stars instead of 5 and put a gif here. Gonna stick it to the man.
Yeah, Lu Xun.
So my low-hanging criticism here is that despite the overarching excellence, I found it hard to disregard the fact that in reality the stories were permeated by what he himself calls a battle cry, meant to illustrate China’s issues and point people in the right direction; he had pretensions to being a doctor of the mind, which is grating. I guess him leaning into preaching does shine through and I think it hobbled his art somewhat, or his storytelling talent. I was quite frustrated with it, because his writing truly is so good. Ironically this would have been his saving point if he were an absolutely shit writer, though. Funny how that works.
Everything else for me was an absolute pleasure, I was veritably delighted reading some of those stories, like I got a frisson of pleasure at reading something TRULY excellent, and stormed through them. Those stories stood out for me, some of which are very close to my heart (notable ones for me: My Old Home and The Loner), because they showcase Lu Xun’s extraordinary talent at depicting nostalgia and longing and humanity while also hinting at harrowing class and identity politics being played out in the background. This is some next level writing.
Admittedly some of them I wasn’t able to understand on a deeper level, I’d think because I don’t have a great understanding of that cultural symbolism that was heavily used to transmit the meaning to its audience. To this I’d say fair enough. I assume Lu Xun got more clandestine in his writing as time went on - his third volume, heavily symbolic and inspired by Chinese mythology, was written at a time when many of his friends and colleagues were assassinated by then already corrupt Communist party. It went over my head and didn’t have enough panache for me to disregard that. I’m not mad about it though.
But I want to touch on something that sits with me. Lu Xun is, for me at this time, so excellent because despite us slowly leaning into a sense of community I’m still into individualism. And when his cynicism and self awareness and loneliness shines through, when he’s going full modernism, he’s GOOD. In Memoriam stuck with me. There is a sense of regret and self awareness and selfishness in there that’s tangible (Sometimes, I see life as a long, grey snake, crawling towards me. I wait, and I wait, watching it approach). He’s got a great feminist sensibility in this and other stories. But in his private life he went for the typical ‘perplexing misogyny’ (as Julia Lovell calls it in introduction) when a woman disagreed with something in his life. I find it hard to believe it's isolated. I’m very familiar with that type of empty proselytising but Diane Nguyen said it best so I’m gonna give Lu Xun 4 stars instead of 5 and put a gif here. Gonna stick it to the man.
Yeah, Lu Xun.
February 14, 2024
The 1920s were a pivotal period in Chinese history and literature between the chaotic political fracturing of the Republic and the rapid consolidation of literary realism informed by popular culture and Western ideas. Writing in the midst of it all was the luminary Lu Xun, a restlessly creative, quarrelsome, and contradictory man most loved for his three volumes of short fiction which English readers can find in full in this well-translated Penguin paperback.
His first two collections, Outcry and Hesitation, are populated by two kinds of stories with one outlier: brief satirical character sketches that skewer the ignorance, selfishness, and cruelty of Chinese peasants and intellectuals alike; melancholic reflections by a solitary, downcast traveler often named 'Xun' and typically set in a snowy, decaying hometown; and "The Real Story of Ah-Q" -- Xun's most ambitious and accomplished tale by far.
Xun (who sank deeper and deeper into Marxism by the turn of 1930s), very ironically, was later deified by the Maoists for the first vein of stories, many of which, when the humor wears thin, appear flat if not mean-spirited. Ironic, because the more subjectively motivated stories -- a fuller expression of Xun's complex vision of the position and tradition of the writer in China -- only rarely support a coherent socialist realist interpretation and are his most consistently enjoyable works. Let's also not forget, per Xun's vision, that Chinese communism did not appear out of the blue from perfectly blameless men and women unburdened by the past: I think the fiction of Yan Lianke does a good job extending Xun's probing satire into the Cultural Revolution, making Ah-Qs out of party cadres.
Xun sometimes ably adapted Western literary techniques -- from the Gogolian nightmare fantasy of "Diary of a Madman" to the stream-of-consciousness in "A Happy Family" -- and intellectual culture (I'm convinced, for example, that Xun was inspired by Freud at the very least in his treatment of the male hair queue as a symbol of castration anxiety).
Published about a decade later, Old Stories Retold adapts Chinese historical vignettes and folk tales. This, Xun seems to suggest, is how the rich patchwork of popular and classical culture can fit into modern Chinese fiction. The humor and social criticism is there, but apart from maybe "Forging the Swords" and "Anti-Aggression," it makes little impression.
Whether it's because of Xun's never-settled view of the role and responsibility of the author, his often caustic narrative distance from his stories and characters, or his malignant perfectionism, few of his stories rise above a certain level of great insight and beauty. Indeed, it's his preface to his first collection, not any of his stories, that contains his most enduring images: the iron house and the slide of the beheading. I feel the same way about Guy de Maupassant's stories, which are similarly well-crafted, interpretively fruitful, and ultimately unfulfilling. But linking all of Xun's stories are his passion and personality, so I'll move on to his essays hoping to find him fulminating in all his snitty, introspective glory.
His first two collections, Outcry and Hesitation, are populated by two kinds of stories with one outlier: brief satirical character sketches that skewer the ignorance, selfishness, and cruelty of Chinese peasants and intellectuals alike; melancholic reflections by a solitary, downcast traveler often named 'Xun' and typically set in a snowy, decaying hometown; and "The Real Story of Ah-Q" -- Xun's most ambitious and accomplished tale by far.
Xun (who sank deeper and deeper into Marxism by the turn of 1930s), very ironically, was later deified by the Maoists for the first vein of stories, many of which, when the humor wears thin, appear flat if not mean-spirited. Ironic, because the more subjectively motivated stories -- a fuller expression of Xun's complex vision of the position and tradition of the writer in China -- only rarely support a coherent socialist realist interpretation and are his most consistently enjoyable works. Let's also not forget, per Xun's vision, that Chinese communism did not appear out of the blue from perfectly blameless men and women unburdened by the past: I think the fiction of Yan Lianke does a good job extending Xun's probing satire into the Cultural Revolution, making Ah-Qs out of party cadres.
Xun sometimes ably adapted Western literary techniques -- from the Gogolian nightmare fantasy of "Diary of a Madman" to the stream-of-consciousness in "A Happy Family" -- and intellectual culture (I'm convinced, for example, that Xun was inspired by Freud at the very least in his treatment of the male hair queue as a symbol of castration anxiety).
Published about a decade later, Old Stories Retold adapts Chinese historical vignettes and folk tales. This, Xun seems to suggest, is how the rich patchwork of popular and classical culture can fit into modern Chinese fiction. The humor and social criticism is there, but apart from maybe "Forging the Swords" and "Anti-Aggression," it makes little impression.
Whether it's because of Xun's never-settled view of the role and responsibility of the author, his often caustic narrative distance from his stories and characters, or his malignant perfectionism, few of his stories rise above a certain level of great insight and beauty. Indeed, it's his preface to his first collection, not any of his stories, that contains his most enduring images: the iron house and the slide of the beheading. I feel the same way about Guy de Maupassant's stories, which are similarly well-crafted, interpretively fruitful, and ultimately unfulfilling. But linking all of Xun's stories are his passion and personality, so I'll move on to his essays hoping to find him fulminating in all his snitty, introspective glory.
June 22, 2020
There are some very good short stories in here that toe a line between autobiography and fiction quite unobtrusively - I skipped the later compilation Old Stories Retold which were less appealing.
One gets an impression of pre-modern China, with the follies of life in this society: after the Madman and Tomorrow, two early highlights, Ah-Q is a very self-deprecating character, not at ease in his own identity and bumping up against different motifs of the time, the foreign-educated, the outcasts and the revolutionaries. It was quite an interesting journey.
Later highlights for me were in Hesitation, including A Happy Family, which I found sincerely heartwarming, A Public Example, which was a model of evocativeness and yet very inconsequential, and The Loner, with mystery surrounding the characters and a final twist. In Memoriam I also found noteworthy in the depictions of poverty in Beijing despite seeming a bit of a tear-jerker.
All in all a good place to start to understand Lu Xun, sitting between two eras of chinese history, later referenced and repurposed by Mao, taught in schools in China to this day and known as the Dickens of China.
One gets an impression of pre-modern China, with the follies of life in this society: after the Madman and Tomorrow, two early highlights, Ah-Q is a very self-deprecating character, not at ease in his own identity and bumping up against different motifs of the time, the foreign-educated, the outcasts and the revolutionaries. It was quite an interesting journey.
Later highlights for me were in Hesitation, including A Happy Family, which I found sincerely heartwarming, A Public Example, which was a model of evocativeness and yet very inconsequential, and The Loner, with mystery surrounding the characters and a final twist. In Memoriam I also found noteworthy in the depictions of poverty in Beijing despite seeming a bit of a tear-jerker.
All in all a good place to start to understand Lu Xun, sitting between two eras of chinese history, later referenced and repurposed by Mao, taught in schools in China to this day and known as the Dickens of China.
May 31, 2019
It was fine. I guess village people are the same everywhere
March 27, 2025
A fascinating collection of stories that give a peek into the ideas and values of 1910s/20s China, only about three of which are fun to read.
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