Wang Anyi is one of the most critically acclaimed and innovative writers in the Chinese-speaking world. She is among the most widely read and anthologized authors of the post-Mao era, a breaker of taboos and a speaker for China's younger generation. Her latest extraordinary novel ‘The Song of the Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai’ is a graceful translation done by Michael Berry and Susan Chang Egan. It spans four decades in the life of a woman making her way in a rapidly changing China.
The book begins in 1945 and ends 40 years later, telling us the story of Wang Qiyao, its heroine. Set in post-World War II Shanghai, the book follows the life of a young girl -Wang Qiyao who is infatuated with the glamour of 1940s Hollywood in pre-revolutionary China, serendipitously poses for a portrait photographer Mr. Cheng. The picture appears on the cover of Shanghai Life magazine and she is dubbed A Proper Young Lady of Shanghai. She went on to win second runner-up place in the Miss Shanghai beauty contest in 1946. This fleeting moment of stardom becomes the pinnacle of her life, and she spends the next forty years clinging to her experience with fame and decadence. In 1960, she runs into Mr. Cheng whom she hasn't seen in 12 years. By then, tragedy and ill-starred romance had ruined Wang Qiyao's reputation and she was pregnant with the child of a lover whose identity she refuses to reveal.
In her beautifully constructed book, Wang Anyi tells a sorrowful tale of Wang Qiyao, who embarks on a lonely, decades-long journey through Shanghai's myriad vast neighborhoods inside enclosed alleys. You will feel nostalgia for the novel's lost time. With its melodramatic and distressingly appropriate ending, the book covers stories of old China versus new, of survival and perseverance in the face of adversity, and of our never-ending quest for transformation and beauty.
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