Love on a Barren Mountain
Love on a Barren Mountain
By Wang Anyi
Translated by Eva Hung
1992 (reprint), 1991
xiii + 145 pages
ISBN 962-7255-09-2
Love on a Barren Mountain is the second story in Wang Anyi's famous Love Trilogy.
Like Love in a Small Town, this novelette is based on a true story of a man and a woman in the Anhui performing arts troupe to which Wang Anyi belonged. The cellist in the story, caught between his passion for his beautiful lover and his affection for his wife and children, is driven to suicide. Wang explores here the tragedy of extra-marital love in a repressive society, and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of men and women in love.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction — ix
Chapter One — 1
Chapter Two — 41
Chapter Three — 93
Chapter Four — 141
Review(s)
Review(s)
'I think she has interesting things to say about relationships between men and women, and anyone familiar with the Chinese literary scene over the past few years will quickly realize how courageous she is to have tackled this subject so honestly and openly.'
—The China Quarterly
'The reader will enjoy and applaud the author's ingenious probing into the psychology of the two sexes in love.'
—Fatima Wu in World Literature Today
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AUTHOR(s)
Wang Anyi, one of the best writers to have emerged in China in the 1980s, was born in 1954 in Nanjing and brought up in Shanghai. She was sent down to Anhui in 1970 during the Cultural Revolution and was assigned to a local performing arts troupe as a cellist. In 1978 she returned to Shanghai, where she began her career as a writer.
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TRANSLATOR(s)
Eva Hung, the translator of this story as well as Love in a Small Town, received her Ph.D. from the University of London. She studied classical Chinese dancing and ballet for ten years, and she plays the piano and the zheng, a Chinese stringed instrument.