|
|
 |
 |
Guanlong Cao
The Attic
Memoir of a Chinese Landlord's Son
$21.95, £12.95 paperback
978-0-520-20406-5
Available Now
255 pages,
April 1996, Available worldwide
Categories: Literary Studies; Autobiography; Literature in Translation; China; Asian Literature
April 1996, Available worldwide
Categories: Literary Studies; Autobiography; Literature in Translation; China; Asian Literature
"Has affinities with the great literature of suffering from our century: Kafka's fables, Primo Levi's memoirs, Anne Frank's diary. . . . Cao [is] a powerful chronicler of his experiences. . . . Engrossing."—Wendy Lesser, New York Times Book Review
"Moving and impressive. . . . It is a tale of resolute survival, a chronicle of hope and spirit conquering adversity and sorrow. It uplifts the soul."—Martin Booth, London Sunday Times
"Cao's descriptions are generous, often haunting, but his language is spare. This is a powerful portrait of political and social repression and intimate pain by a writer willing to boldly engage his own memories."—Kirkus Reviews
"Cao captures both the ordinary and the extraordinary events and relationships in a life ruled by Mao's Little Red Book. . . . This unadorned but artful account of his daily life . . . jolts the Western reader into a keen sense of the hardships and upheaval of those times."—Publishers Weekly
"Moving and impressive. . . . It is a tale of resolute survival, a chronicle of hope and spirit conquering adversity and sorrow. It uplifts the soul."—Martin Booth, London Sunday Times
"Cao's descriptions are generous, often haunting, but his language is spare. This is a powerful portrait of political and social repression and intimate pain by a writer willing to boldly engage his own memories."—Kirkus Reviews
"Cao captures both the ordinary and the extraordinary events and relationships in a life ruled by Mao's Little Red Book. . . . This unadorned but artful account of his daily life . . . jolts the Western reader into a keen sense of the hardships and upheaval of those times."—Publishers Weekly
"Emotionally intense. With candor and humor, Cao reveals the reality of human pettiness and cruelty at a time of political repression and material scarcity."—Rey Chow, author of Writing Diaspora and Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema
"In this poignant and moving memoir, Guanlong Cao has captured the beauty and the cruelty, the mundane and the memorable, in prose that is deceptively sparse. With uncommon wit and an eye for the bizarre, he has created a haunting image of contemporary China."—Howard Goldblatt, editor of Chairman Mao Would Not be Amused: Fiction from Today's China and translator of Blood Red Sunset
"Beneath Cao's descriptions of daily life lurks an intense, troubled humanism. It generates metaphor and imagination that, like good poetry, can make you look again at ordinary things and see them as if for the first time. Occasionally it reaches out, grabs you, and pulls you cringing through pages you will never forget."—Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing and editor ofRoses and Thorns
"In this poignant and moving memoir, Guanlong Cao has captured the beauty and the cruelty, the mundane and the memorable, in prose that is deceptively sparse. With uncommon wit and an eye for the bizarre, he has created a haunting image of contemporary China."—Howard Goldblatt, editor of Chairman Mao Would Not be Amused: Fiction from Today's China and translator of Blood Red Sunset
"Beneath Cao's descriptions of daily life lurks an intense, troubled humanism. It generates metaphor and imagination that, like good poetry, can make you look again at ordinary things and see them as if for the first time. Occasionally it reaches out, grabs you, and pulls you cringing through pages you will never forget."—Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing and editor ofRoses and Thorns
Novelist Guanlong Cao's autobiographical account of growing up in urban Shanghai affords a rare glimpse into daily life during the forty turbulent years following the Communist Revolution. Forced to the bottom of Chinese society as "class enemies," Cao's family eked out a meager existence in a cramped attic. The details of their day-to-day existence—the endless quest for enough food, its preparation, Cao's schooling and friends, the stirrings of sexual desire, his dreams and fantasies—are brought brilliantly to life in spare yet evocative prose. The memoir illuminates a world largely unknown to Westerners, one where human pettiness, cruelty, joy, and tenderness play themselves out against a backdrop of political upheaval and material scarcity.
Reminiscent of the concise style of classical Chinese memoirs, Cao's lean, elegant prose heightens the emotional intensity of his story. Perceptive and humorous, his voice is deeply original. It is a voice that demands to be heard—for the historical moment it captures as well as for the personal revelations it distills.
Reminiscent of the concise style of classical Chinese memoirs, Cao's lean, elegant prose heightens the emotional intensity of his story. Perceptive and humorous, his voice is deeply original. It is a voice that demands to be heard—for the historical moment it captures as well as for the personal revelations it distills.
FROM THE BOOK:
"I sniffed the air, trying to catch every molecule of the scent wafting from her short sleeves. The smell was strange. A little salty, a little sweet, sort of like overfermented rice wine with, perhaps, a baby's diaper among the rags that wrapped the fermentation barrel. It made me dizzy. I felt as if I had gulped down an entire bowl of warm sake. My fingers convulsed, but I held the contraction, letting the stress in the tendons spread and dissolve into a flood of goose bumps on my arms. Quietly they rose and quietly they faded. Nobody noticed. I knew I had grown up."
"I sniffed the air, trying to catch every molecule of the scent wafting from her short sleeves. The smell was strange. A little salty, a little sweet, sort of like overfermented rice wine with, perhaps, a baby's diaper among the rags that wrapped the fermentation barrel. It made me dizzy. I felt as if I had gulped down an entire bowl of warm sake. My fingers convulsed, but I held the contraction, letting the stress in the tendons spread and dissolve into a flood of goose bumps on my arms. Quietly they rose and quietly they faded. Nobody noticed. I knew I had grown up."