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Title: Playing for Thrills by Wang Shuo, Howard Goldblatt, Shuo Wang ISBN: 0-14-026971-1 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: April, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.43 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Wang Shuo plays the reader for thrills
Comment: In Playing for Thrills, Wang Shuo weaves a complex, compelling, and utterly confusing web in which the reader is quickly trapped. The book is neither noir nor surreal, as it is often labelled, but filtered through the hazy lens of alientation and indifference, the reader quickly becomes as defracted as the characters.
I hated this book, but found it totally addictive. Wang Shuo is a master storyteller, and like a good film director, cleverly manipulates his audience, and we are always exactly where he wants us to be.
The plot is pretty petty and pointless, but the rambling narrative presents the best literary portrait there is of Beijing in the 1980s. It is especially amusing in its scathing portrait of the new semi-rich wheeler-dealer class, in all their tastelessness and self-importance.
Wang Shuo is arguably the most critically and commercially successful writer in modern China, and is also an acclaimed screen writer. This book may not provide a sense of his importance, but it will introduce readers to his expertly maneuvered prose.
Rating: 3
Summary: Impressive translation by Goldblatt.
Comment: I first read this book in chinese when I was 14. Like most 14 year-old, I read it only as a book that my parents wouldn't allow me to read. (By the way, it is never really banned in China, only criticized heavily by the authorities.) At that time, I found the book to be quite humorous, but nothing special. It wasn't the funniest book from Wang Shuo by all means. Twelve years later, I came across its english translation accidentally on a dusty library shelf. I was curious, picked it up, and started reading. Goldblatt's translation is very impressive, in fact, it doesn't have any of the awkard moments or sentences most of the translated works have here and there. He may have missed a few very subtle innuendos, but overall, the translation gave the book an even dreamier environment, and curiously, more fluent language than the original. I had to get the chinese edition and read it all over again, and after that, I have to admit for the first time that a translated work is actually better than the original. As for Wang Shuo's novel itself, this is probably the most structually complex one, and he did show off his enormous writing skills. But as the plot and character development goes, it's not the top of his work. It's about a generation (if you divide each generation by 10 years) that has robbed of its older ideology, the one they've been brought up with, so they become cynical; and yet, they could not adopt to the newer money-oriented philosophy of the younger generation, so they are still sincere and innocent in their own mind. To have spent their childhood and youth in the Culture Revolution, this is a story about a generation that's alienated from the society that has become, and yet desperately wants to join in the fun that they definitely know they won't enjoy. I actually liked his later works better. His latest work (also on Fang Yan and Gao Yang and the entire gang) is interestly set in kindergarden, and is the two thirds of the book that "Playing for thrills" had implied at the very end.
Rating: 2
Summary: Don't Believe the Hype
Comment: I read some of the hype about this book and picked it up at the library-wish I hadn't. It resulted in possibly the most annoying few hours I've ever spent reading. Make no mistake, I enjoy good surrealism (Gogol for one) and noir (Chandler, et al), and I am reasonably well steeped in Asian pop culture, but this was a total disappointment. It starts confusingly, but I figured things would gradually clear up as I read along, however by the end I was no further along in understanding the book. The aimless plot clearly is meant as a portrait and critique of modern urban Chinese society, with it's attendant cynical wheeler-dealer underworld figures, but that's about it. Stephen King bafflingly blurbed it as "the most brilliantly entertaining hardboiled novel of the 90s." It might actually work better as film, perhaps in the hands of a master of atmosphere and mood like Wong Kar Wai.
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