Name: Fortress Besieged
ISBN: 9780811215527

Zhongshu Qian

In a classic novel set in middle-class Chinese society on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, Fang-Hung-chien obtains a teaching position, using a degree from a fake American university, in a Chinese university--where the pseudo-intellectuals become the butt of the author's satire--and becomes trapped in an absurd and distressing marriage. Original.

Fortress Besieged

altlovesbooks

DNF - Page 254 (perhaps 2/3rds of the way through)

Maybe I need to be a Chinese native to really get something out of this book that I see others are getting out of it. I tried to power through and finish it, especially since I was more than halfway through, but I failed to really connect with any of the characters or the (extremely slow moving) plot. From doing some research it sounds like maybe the translation doesn't do it justice? Unsure. It's supposed to be humorous and is hailed for its satire and wordplay, but I just didn't see much here that I thought was funny. Maybe the humor is lost in the translation.

Qian Zhongshu

Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, Fortress Besieged recounts the exuberant misadventures of the hapless hero Fang Hung-chien, who after aimlessly studying in Europe at his family's expense returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fake university. On the liner back, Fang's life becomes deeply entangled with those of two Chinese beauties - while when he does finally make it home, he obtains a teaching post at a newly established university, encounters effete pseudo-intellectuals, and falls into a marriage of disastrous proportions. A glorious tale of love, marriage, war, calamity, disillusionment and hope, this is one of the greatest Chinese novels: combining Eastern philosophy, Western traditions, adventure, tragicomedy and satire to create a unique feast of delights.

Gavin

“I talked to Bertie about his marriages and divorces once,” Shenming said. “He said that there’s a saying in English that marriage is like a gilded birdcage. The birds outside want to get in, and the birds inside want to get out, he said, so divorce leads to marriage and marriage leads to divorce and there’s never any end to it.”

“There’s a saying like that in France, too,” Miss Su said. “Only there it’s about a forteresse assiégée — a fortress under siege. The people outside want to storm in, and the people inside are desperate to get out.”



Two books: one farce (A Confederacy of Dunces meets the Campus Trilogy - which would be the highest praise, if those books didn't have contradictory goals and tones), one soft Bovary tragedy. Internationalist (most characters speak another language), if only for comic effect.

The main character, Fang Hongjian ("Grand Drippy Square" or maybe "Local Big Soak"), is a pompous fraud who slowly realises that all of his fellow intellectuals are the same. Forced to adlib a speech on what he learned about the West during his long (bogus) studies there, he comes up with:

  there are only two items from the West which have been lasting in Chinese society. One is opium, and the other is syphilis. These are what the Ming dynasty assimilated of Western civilization.


The Japanese invade midway through but are just a nuisance to Fang, who is much more vexed by his parents messing with his marriage.

People complain about the translation, but they've done that with three different translations, so maybe the stodginess is in the original too, and its air of cosmopolitan, Wodehousian lightness is just air.

Fortress Besieged

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