基本信息·出版社：Bloomsbury Publishing PLC ·页码：304 页 ·出版日期：2007年10月 ·ISBN：0747582483 ·条形码：9780747582489 ·装帧：平装 ·正文 ...
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Peony in Love |
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Peony in Love |
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基本信息·出版社：Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
·页码：304 页
·出版日期：2007年10月
·ISBN：0747582483
·条形码：9780747582489
·装帧：平装
·正文语种：英语
·外文书名：恋爱中的牡丹
内容简介 Peony is the cherished only child of the first wife of a wealthy Chinese nobleman. Yet she is betrothed to a man she has never met and as her sixteenth birthday approaches, she has spoken to no man other than her father and never ventured outside the cloistered women's quarters of the Chen Family Villa. She is trapped like a good-luck cricket in a bamboo-and-lacquer cage and the romantic lyrics from the Chinese classic novel The Peony Pavilion mirror her own longings. Though raised to be obedient, Peony has dreams of her own. Her father engages a small theatrical troupe to perform scenes from the epic opera of The Peony Pavilion - a live spectacle that few women have ever seen - in their garden amidst the scent of ginger, green tea and jasmine. Peony's mother is against the production: "Unmarried girls should not be seen in public." But Peony's father prevails. Women will watch the opera from behind a screen to hide them from view and through a crack, Peony catches sight of an elegant, handsome man with hair as black as a cave and is immediately bewitched by him. So begins Peony's journey of love, desire and sorrow as Lisa See's haunting new novel takes readers back to seventeenth-century China and into the heart and soul of an unforgettable heroine.
作者简介 Lisa See is the author of the best-selling Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Flower Net, The Interior and Dragon Bones, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir On Gold Mountain. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles.
编辑推荐 Review Praise for SNOWFLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN: 'Lisa See has written her best book yet achingly beautiful, a marvel of imagination of a real and secret world that has only recently disappeared.' Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club 'Only the best novelists can do what Lisa See has done, to bring to life not only a character but an entire culture, and a sensibility so strikingly different from our own engrossing and completely convincing.' Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha 'This novel is an epic journey, as exciting and believable as it is thrillingly original.' Sunday Express 'The wonder of this book is that it takes readers to a place at once foreign and familiar Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a triumph on every level, a beautiful, heartbreaking story.' Washington Post
Foot-binding, opera and anorexia are feminist statements in See's (Snowflower and the Secret Fan, 2005, etc.) ghost story set in 17th-century China.The monumental (55-scene) opera Peony Pavilion, written in the twilight of the Ming Dynasty, tells the tale of Liniang, who defies convention by seeking to choose her own mate, then wastes away of lovesickness. Peony, coddled teenage daughter of the Chen clan, is not the only aristocratic maiden to be love-struck by the opera (still considered outre in China today). Although promised in an arranged marriage, Peony observes a "man-beautiful" poet from behind a screen at a performance of Pavilion, and she falls in love. Risking ruin, she meets him for chaste garden trysts to discuss poetry and qinq (emotion-ruled life). As her marriage approaches, Peony emulates Liniang's self-starvation, devoting her time to annotating the pages of various editions of Pavilion. Through a tragedy of errors, Peony learns, on her deathbed, that her betrothed Wu Ren is her poet. After death, someone hides Peony's ancestor tablet, condemning her to wander the earth as a "hungry ghost." She visits Ren in dreams and pens more Pavilion marginalia. On a limbo-like "Viewing Terrace" she meets her grandmother, killed during the "Cataclysm," the carnage marking the advent of the Manchu Dynasty. Horrified, Peony witnesses Ren's marriage to her spoiled rival, Tan Ze. She molds Ze into an ideal wife, daughter-in-law and fellow Pavilion annotator. But Ze dies while pregnant, and is consigned to the Blood-Gathering Lake, special hell of women who fail at childbirth. In a world where women are punished in life and afterlife, the Manchus threaten more oppression, toward female literati who organize writing groups and publish their poetry. Peony atones for Ze's fate by helping peasant girl Yi advance socially and buck the Manchu regime - by binding her feet. As Ren's third wife, Yi joins Ze and Peony in coauthoring the groundbreaking Three Wives Commentary, which examines Peony Pavilion.See's gossamer weave of cultural detail and Chinese afterlife mythology forms an improbably inspiring tapestry of love and letters. (Kirkus Reviews)
Kate Saunders, The Times `Those who adored See's sublime Snow Flower and the Secret Fan will be delighted by this sensuous and imaginative bringing-to-life of Chinese history'
Observer `Those wishing to carry out a modern-day foot-binding could do worse than invest in this operatic Chinese romance, which exhaustively details the bone-splintering agonies ... fascinating ... the real delight lies in See's exhaustive research into the period'
