Book Review: Love in a Fallen City is so obviously good that it tests the limits of translated fiction. Written when Chinese culture was changing, traditions were failing, war and revolution threatening. Eileen Chang explored universal human emotions in a time and milieu almost completely foreign to Western readers. That she could present real, credible human beings in such a setting is a testament to her wonderful ability as a writer. These stories make me conclude that any difficulties I had stem more from my cultural ignorance than any flaw in the writing. How much am I missing because I don't know Chinese literary traditions, history, and culture? The themes are of the conflicts of romance and marriage in a changing society, like a latter-day Jane Austen, only with concubines, opium, and inevitable desolation. A world inevitably difficult for women, leading to family trouble and various forms of self-destruction. Each story in Love in a Fallen City is individual, with Chang trying different techniques and approaches. In "The Golden Cangue" she makes the story real through vivid description and fantastic colors: "The sky was a cold bleak crab-shell blue" (a "cangue" is an unmoored pillory). "Sealed Off" still seems modern while being subversive and metaphorical. All the stories delve deep into examination of thoughts, feelings, fears, motivations, emotions. Plot is secondary. The stories in Love in a Fallen City reward slow reading, even re-reading, yet the reader wants to skim ahead to find what happens because we care about these people. Chang packs so much into each scene, each sentence, the reading is almost too rich. [4★]
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