Posted by guillermo maynez
on 12/12/2011, 11:50:01, in reply to "Re: Rickshaw (aka Camel Xiangzi)"
189.178.234.130
I finished "Rickshaw Boy" last Friday. The first thing I want to mention here is how much it resembles Adiga's "The White Tiger", even though the characters are different and there is a wide separation in time, between China's 1930īs and Indiaīs 2000īs (is that right?). I was also reminded of the character of Franz Biberkopf in "Berlin Alexanderplatz", or, for that matter, Jean Valjean is "Les Miserables": esentially good guys, born or thrown into the gutters of society, who try their best and hardest to make it in life, only to be defeated time and again by social trends, bad people, and their own defencelessness.
Another category I would put the book into is "the most depressing novels I have ever read".
--Previous Message--
: Thanks again! You are very right, as I'm reading the
: book, I have kept imagining the "courtyard"
: as a very big space surrounded by lodging buildings.
: When preparations were made for Fourth Master Liu's
: birthday party, the talk about the "big
: tent", according to me, confirmed I was right,
: for it seems that the large tent would obviously have
: to be installed in that same big courtyard. Now I have
: trouble imagining the tent, unless Master Liu's
: compound had a big unused space at the back or to one
: side.
:
: --Previous Message--
: I finished Rickshaw last night. As we discussed
: earlier,
: I was reading the translation by Jean M. James. How
: are the rest of you doing and which translation are
: you reading?
:
: Beijing has, of course, changed enormously since the
: 1920s when the novel is set. The city walls and gates
: are all gone, replaced by ring roads. Many of the
: neighborhoods are unchanged, however, and last year I
: visited a courtyard residence similar to the one
: featured in the novel.
:
:
:
: As you can see from the photo, the courtyard is much
: narrower than the mental picture you are likely to
: have while reading the book. It is more an alley than
: a yard. The living conditions have no doubt improved
: over the years. Families typically buy up or rent
: several adjoining rooms, or even the entire courtyard.
: One thing that hasn't changed, though is the communal
: privy, easily located by its smell. The individual
: homes have electricity and internet, but no running
: water.
:
: The courtyard residences of Beijing are called
: "Hutongs," and there is a nice article on
: them in Wikipedia:
: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutong
:
:
:
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