Love in a Fallen City is a book of stories by Eileen Chang, who is known as one of China’s four women geniuses. Chang will make you feel like you’re watching a movie with her characters and descriptions. You will read Hong Kong and Shanghai of the 1940s with traditions, relationships and love, and feel the effects of war.
Chang tells such a different culture in such a beautiful way that it is impossible not to get lost in her stories. Sometimes I thought about a sentence she wrote for minutes, and I had to reread the whole page. Although I read a translation, I tried to read the book as slowly as I could to enjoy the finely crafted sentences.
Chang is a different writer. But the female characters in her stories will feel very familiar. They’ll feel familiar because women, no matter where they are in the world, have very similar problems. If you want to read a writer from Chinese literature, Eileen Chang should be among your choices. You will be amazed by the colours of the unique world she has created and will meet a different genius. Enjoy!
About the book: Love in a Fallen City
Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China. Where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement however is her short fiction—tales of love. Longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work. In summary introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.
About the author: Eileen Chang
Eileen Chang, also known as Zhang Ailing or Chang Ai-ling, was a Chinese writer during the 20th century. Eileen was born with an aristocratic lineage and educated bilingually in Shanghai. She gained literary prominence in Japanese-occupied Shanghai between 1943 and 1945.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
