The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei: Volume Five: The Dissolution (Princeton Library of Asian Translations)
One ofThe Wall Street JournalBookshelf Best Books of 2013, chosen by Tash Aw"[A] book of manners for the debauched. Its readers in the late Ming period likely hid it under their bedcovers."--Amy Tan,New York Times Book Review"David Tod Roy, after more 20 years of work, completed the fifth volume of his translation of theChin Ping Mei, entitledThe Plum in the Golden Vase. It's a masterpiece an epic scholarly achievement. . . . The world of theChin Ping Meiis beautiful and dark, cheap and exalted, righteous and profane, gorgeous and lurid and stinking and glorious."--Stephen Marche,Los Angeles Review of Books"Roy's complete translation makes it possible for English readers everywhere to read and appreciate this work, one of the great, sophisticated masterpieces of world literature."--ChoicePraise for the previous volumes: "[I]t is time to remind ourselves thatThe Plum in the Golden Vaseis not just about sex, whether the numerous descriptions of sexual acts throughout the novel be viewed as titillating, harshly realistic, or, in Mr. Roy's words, intended 'to express in the most powerful metaphor available to him the author's contempt for the sort of persons who indulge in them.' The novel is a sprawling panorama of life and times in urban China, allegedly set safely in the Sung dynasty, but transparently contemporary to the author's late sixteenth-century world, as scores of internal references demonstrate. The eight hundred or so men, women, and children who appear in the book cover a breath-taking variety of human types, and encompass pretty much every imaginable mood and genre--from sadism to tenderness, from light humor to philosophical musings, from acute social commentary to outrageous satire."--Jonathan Spence,New York Review of BooksPraise for the previous volumes:"Roy's translation provides a window onto the fall of a far bleaker house than anything contrived by Dickens."--Andrew Radford,Translation and LiteraturePraise for the previous volumes:"Reading Roy's translation is a remarkable experience."--Robert Chatain,Chicago Tribune Review of BooksPraise for the previous volumes:"Clearly David Roy is the greatest scholar-translator in the field of premodern vernacular Chinese fiction. . . . The puns and various other kinds of word plays that abound in theChin P'ing Meiare so difficult to translate that I can't help 'slapping the table in amazement' each time I see evidence of Roy's masterful rendition of them. . . . I recommend this book, in the strongest possible terms, to anyone interested in the novel form in general, in Chinese literature in particular, or in the translation of Chinese literature."--Shuhui Yang,Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews