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    The Red Chamber
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    The Red Chamber
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    The Red Chamber
    Audiobook16 hours

    The Red Chamber

    Written by Pauline A. Chen

    Narrated by Grayce Wey

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In this lyrical reimagining of the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber, set against the breathtaking backdrop of eighteenth-century Beijing, the lives of three unforgettable women collide in the inner chambers of the Jia mansion. When orphaned Daiyu leaves her home in the provinces to take shelter with her cousins in the Capital, she is drawn into a world of opulent splendor, presided over by the ruthless, scheming Xifeng and the prim, repressed Baochai. As she learns the secrets behind their glittering façades, she finds herself entangled in a web of intrigue and hidden passions, reaching from the petty gossip of the servants' quarters all the way to the Imperial Palace. When a political coup overthrows the emperor and plunges the once-mighty family into grinding poverty, each woman must choose between love and duty, friendship and survival.

    In this dazzling debut, Pauline A. Chen draws the reader deep into the secret, exquisite world of the women's quarters of an aristocratic household, where the burnish of wealth and refinement mask a harsher truth: marriageable girls are traded like chattel for the family's advancement, and to choose to love is to risk everything.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 10, 2012
    ISBN9780449008829
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Red Chamber

    3.5/5

    48 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      3.5 starsThis is a retelling of a Chinese classic book, but pared down. Chen took out some of the characters and storylines and cut down the text substantially (from, I think, over 1000 pages). It’s the early 18th century. Daiyu is left an orphan and must travel to live with the rest of her family. Her grandmother never forgave Daiyu’s mother for leaving. Daiyu meets her cousins and it doesn’t take long to fall in love with one of them, Baoyu, but she doesn’t have a hope of becoming betrothed to him, although he has also fallen for her. She becomes good friends with Baochai. In other storylines, there is someone getting out of a murder charge; there are concubines and affairs. I thought this was good, although it took some time to try to sort out all the characters, with the Chinese names, and I was listening to the audio, so I couldn’t really check back for clarification. So, that took some time. Not that I can really compare it to the original (apparently, the ending was lost), but I thought Chen did a really good job of telling the story that she did. I also like the way she ended it.
    • 5/5
      After a bit of a slow start that was almost soap operatic in nature due to the sheer amount of secrets, lies, betrayals and affairs abounding, The Red Chamber impressed me with its scope and tragedy. Though I had anticipated an impending Tragedy with overtones of Old Timey Romantical Problems, this novel is far more than just love-triangles in powerful family. Based on one of China's Four Great Classical Novels, the 18th-century The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone) Chen's condensed version of the classic presents a more streamlined cast (down from 40 principle and 400 supporting to a much more manageable dozen or so main and limited background characters) and allows for more immediate impact from their respective edited storylines. I have not yet read the original version of The Dream of the Red Chamber, though I fully plan to now that I have devoured this in under a day, so I cannot honestly attest to the quality and breadth of this author's personal adaptation, but I can vouch for this novel's own uniquely compelling merits, of which there are many to enjoy. Historical fiction readers who enjoy convoluted family politics, strong and realistically flawed female protagonists set amid a backdrop of Imperial intrigue and maneuvering have found their next read right here.If the author hadn't pared down the cast of characters invented by original author Cao Xueqin, each of the 40 main and 400 supporting wouldn't even get a page to themselves in this still-lengthy 400-page version. Clearly both the original author and Pauline Chen have a large scope and vision for their narrative and largely, it works. My few problems with The Red Chamber happened early and dissipated long before the end; the narrative jumps from character to character along a (seemingly) connected plotline, but there isn't much plot to be seen for the first 150 or so pages, and the characters themselves can come across as largely formulaic up to that point. Once the massive groundwork has been laid and personalities established, Chen really jumps into her novel. This seven-part novel is alive with a tangible, real feel for both its characters and its Qing setting and both benefit under the steady hand of this debut author. Condensing over 2000 pages into a compact 400 pag version cannot be an easy task, but outside from the sluggish introduction, I have to think that Chen did a remarkable job making the story, especially one so intricate and convoluted, definitely hers while still managing to pay homage to the ideas, themes and plotlines that made the first, original edition so well-loved and widely-read across China. I haven't read a ton of Chinese historical fiction, and the only one I've truly loved before this was Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Happily the Manchu women shown in The Red Chamber don't undergo the tortuous footbinding I had to read about in Lisa See's novel, but their lives are just as constricted, regulated and predetermined as Lily and Snow Flower's golden toes ever were. This novel has a lot of main characters, but it is largely the women who take the cake; it is the women who save the Jia family over and over, usually with little to no thanks. Pauline Chen's cast of smart but very different women has several interesting parallels: Xifeng and Ping'ers friendship lost over love is mirrored in the storyline (and love-triangle) of Baochai, Daiyu and Baoyu. Each girl from either pair makes their decisions for love, for money, for security and Chen illustrates each at their best and their worst. It's easy to root for little Daiyu, to root for Xifeng in her canny awareness or to commiserate with Ping'er: though it takes a while to get there, this novel makes you care at least a little bit about its core group of flawed characters. As I said, there are several love-triangles present, and one of them is among three cousins, but keep in mind that this was written during the 1700s, when different social mores and ideas weren't thought of in the same way as in the modern age.The third person omniscient POV used does -- thankfully -- keep The Red Chamber from the problem of too many individual, first-person POVs that so many other novels seem suffer from, but it also creates a bit of distance between the reader and some of the characters. I never connected or invested in Baochai, nor Lian, but perhaps that was point because both could be seen as obstacles in the way of happiness for other characters in the novel. Either way, this author takes time and care to present her characters as individual people, pulled by different wants and needs all tied neatly and permanently together due to family. Unifying themes of nostalgia, destiny help to pull all the overall plotlines of The Red Chamber back together for a solidly entertaining debut from this new author.
    • 3/5
      Good, but very similar to many other books written by Chinese authors. It is the story of life in China during the 1700's--so it would appear. The life for women if they were out of favor is depicted very well. Additionally the transition from wealth to poverty because of being out of political favor is portrayed, as well as the prevalence of disease.
    • 2/5
      The good thing that has come out of my attempt to read this is that I have been made aware of the existence of this Chinese classic and will now be seeking it out to enjoy the original. Perhaps it's actually a problem with the original story, but the writing of this book just felt passionless and unconvincing; the ancient Chinese setting was underdeveloped (if not for its being touted as a reworking of the Chinese classic, and the Chinese names of the characters, I would have been hard pressed to find convincing "Chinese" elements at all); and the characters spoke with such frustratingly laughable unnaturalness.
    • 4/5
      I did rather enjoy this intricate retelling of the story as detailed in the review before mine. Daiyu was my favorite character, but all the characters were impeccably detailed. It was easy to become involved and I found myself finishing this novel in two days -- I would recommend it to someone to loves historical fiction, especially as finding Chinese historical fiction is difficult at times.
    • 3/5
      Holy anachronisms, Batman. This hugely entertaining, if not particularly well-written reimagining of Cao Xueqin's 18th century classic, is full of clunky phrases like "Pan had killed someone. Could he actually escape scot-free?" (it must be noted that "scot-free" shows up not once but TWICE. Does Knopf not hire editors or what?) and hilariously unsubtle observations like "She feels oppressed by the weight of being the perfect daughter". At one point, the phrase "adieu" is used in a riddle, and while I don't know anything about Chinese-French relations during the Qing Dynasty (school is wasted on the young) I'm pretty sure that "adieu" was probably not in the lexicon of young Chinese aristocratic women of the time. To be fair, this phrase was taken from David Hawkes' translation and it is needed for a rhyme, but you think SOMEONE would have noticed.

      That being said, I'm a sucker for all that exotic Oriental shit (crushed jasmines, mother-of-pearl screens, vests embroidered with gold flowers, etc) which I'm not sure is okay to say because while I'm Chinese, I'm so divorced from that culture that it sounds fetishistic but let's leave it at that. I also love palace intrigue, downstairs/upstairs stories (we get a few subplots involving the servants and maids), and abrupt changes in fortune, all of which this book is happy to supply me with. While the Red Chamber is nominally centered around a love triangle, the real focus is on the complicated friendships and relationships between the women at the Rongguo Mansion. My favorite character was Wang Xifeng, who I imagine as the Cersei Lannister of Beijing, slinging back wine and having steamy affairs (not with her brother though) and generally ruining the illusions of more naive girls. Her sisterwife-like relationship with her body servant, Ping'er, is one of the more interesting aspects of the novel.

      Red Chamber reminds me a lot of that other recent reworking of an epic, which was also written by an Ivy League classics student-turned-classics-professor. While Red Chamber's sex scenes are way less sappy than the ones in "Song of Achilles", the novels share that same modern desire of examining the psychology of characters who are touchstones in their respective cultures. They also both suffer from a fairly shallow reading of the original text and a lack of a subtle hand (maybe Chen and Miller could have benefited from studying English lit as well just to see how the competent English-language writers do it. JUST SAYIN.)

      Final verdict: I'd definitely recommend this book as pure entertainment. It's so easy to read and just as soapy as anything you'd watch on a Shonda Rimes TV show. I couldn't put it down (which I can't say for any book I've read since middle school). Plus, it might pique your interest in the real thing. I've always wanted to read Hawkes' translation but I was always intimidated by the length and the amount of characters. Maybe this introduction will make it a little easier.
    • 4/5
      This isn't particularly written well, nor is the story particularly novel. But the characters are well constructed and complicated, and it somehow became a very enjoyable airplane read which I could not put down.
    • 2/5
      When Daiyu is orphaned and brought to the Jia's house in the Capital, it was beyond her imagination that she would soon be involved in the dangerous intrigue that happens behind beautiful smiles and welcoming facades. The reader follows the stories of three girls in this time period that leaves women with no choices of their own.

      This story is a tragedy, for the most part. And I loved that about this book, that the ending was tragic instead of something happily ever after. It made the sorrows and difficult moments more real, more believable, more heart-striking.

      But the thing about this book is just that I don't love any of the characters. I don't hurt when they hurt, I don't love as they love. None of them endeared themselves to me - and this book was all about the characters. But even Daiyu, the supposed main character, did not make me eager to learn more about her or to watch her grow as a person in love or in character. It was like reading a story about strangers you don't particularly care about.

      It took such a long time to fall into this world, to understand customs and implicit rules.

      But there were so many beautiful moments, so many poignant moments that hurt so deeply or drew such beautiful pictures to mind. I kept turning the pages, I kept on reading.

      And for that, two stars. I didn't love it, but I didn't drop it and I didn't hate it.
      Recommended to people who love this time period or perhaps have previous knowledge of the original book this one was based off of.
    • 4/5
      Pauline Chen’s new novel, The Red Chamber, is actually a retelling of a classic Chinese novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Chen’s version is severely truncated; the original novel is currently sold by Penguin in three volumes and was never finished. Chen freely admits she has taken many liberties with the story in order to better introduce it to Western audiences, she claims. I can in no way compare the two, since I had not even heard of the original before reading Chen’s book, so I will take The Red Chamber as a unique work of fiction.The Red Chamber is set in 18th c. China and details the lives of the Jia family. The Jias are wealthy and have long and good connections to the imperial palace through the family patriarch, Jia Zheng; however, it is Lady Jia who truly rules the household. When Daiyu’s mother dies, her father sends her to stay with her maternal grandmother at the Jia family palace. There Daiyu meets three individuals who will leave indelible marks on her life: Xue Baochi, daughter of the widowed sister-in-law of Jia Zheng, Wang Xifeng, wife of Jia Lian, and Jia Baoyu, Zheng’s son and Lady Jia’s favorite (there is a helpful family tree at the beginning of the novel). The novel details the intimate family bonds and sometimes chains that bind each character, except for Daiyu, perhaps. It is grand and intimate at the same time; family drama set against the back drop of imperial strife.Chen’s narrative is told through mainly the three females of the novel, with occasional forays into Zheng’s or Baoyu’s perspective. Each of the women is unique as are their voices. Xifeng is the under-appreciated house-hold manager, Baochi is the seemingly cold but dutiful daughter, and Daiyu is the “gauche” newcomer, daughter of a mother who threw away everything and defied Lady Jia to marry for love. Lady Jia never forgave her, even in death and her wrath has carried over to Daiyu. Three events set the course for the fate of the Jia family: the cover up of a murder, illicit love (on multiple fronts), and the fall of an Emperor. How will Daiyu survive in the grand city of Bejing amid all of the family politics and sweeping change?Many have compared this to Artur Goldstein’s Memoirs of a Geisha, but I was constantly reminded of Raise the Red Lantern, the film by Zhang Yimou. I really, really enjoyed this novel. It immediately draws the reader in and through Chen’s gift for narrative, we begin to understand what drives each of the three women and who they must be in a tight-knit family irrevocably bound together. I wanted more after finishing this, and perhaps that was Chen’s intent: give Western readers a taste of a massive and loved Chinese classic so they’ll go in search of the original. While I’m not rushing out to the bookstore to find it, I did add it to my never-ending wishlist. Final verdict: highly recommended for those who love to be swept away by historical and intimate family portraits.