Once on a Moonless Night

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Once on a Moonless Night
		Once on a Moonless Night

基本信息·出版社：Knopf
·页码：288 页
·出版日期：2009年08月
·ISBN：0307271587
·International Standard Book Number：0307271587
·条形码：9780307271587
·EAN：9780307271587
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语
·外文书名：无月之夜

内容简介 From the author of the beloved best seller Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a haunting tale of love and of the beguiling power of a lost language.

When Puyi, the last emperor, was exiled to Manchuria in the early 1930s, it is said that he carried an eight-hundred-year-old silk scroll inscribed with a lost sutra composed by the Buddha. Eventually the scroll would be sold illicitly to an eccentric French linguist named Paul d’Ampere, in a transaction that would land him in prison, where he would devote his life to studying the ineffably beautiful ancient language of the forgotten text.

Our unnamed narrator, a Western student in China in the 1970s, hears this story from the greengrocer Tumchooq—his name the same as that of the language in which the scroll is written—who has recently returned from three years of reeducation. She will come again and again to Tumchooq’s shop near the gates of the Forbidden City, drawn by the young man and his stories of an estranged father. But when d’Ampere is killed in prison, Tumchooq disappears, abandoning the narrator, now pregnant with his child. And it is she, going in search of her lost love, who will at last find the missing scroll and discover the truth of the Buddha’s lesson that begins “Once on a moonless night . . .” in this story that carries us across the breadth of China’s past, the myth and the reality.
作者简介 Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a filmmaker and novelist. He left China in 1984 for France, where he now lives and works. He is the author of the international best seller Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom and made into a film) and of Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch (winner of the Prix Femina).
编辑推荐 ACCLAIM FOR DAI SIJIE’S ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT:

“beautifully written (and translated)”
- Aamer Hussein, The Independent

“rich and ambitious….Sijie makes virtuosic use of the stories-within-stories technique which is so attractive to contemporary sensibilities and paints a vivid portrait of both imperial excesses and communist absurdities.”
- Michael Arditti, Daily Mail

“magisterial….structurally more complex than his international hit, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress….just as rich and evocative and powerfully delivers the idea that lnaguage (even more than literature, as in Balzac) truly defines us. This should be almost as big as Balzac. Highly recommended.”
- Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal


From the first British reviews:
“cunning literary confection, blending history, romance, a long-lost manuscript and the magic of the Orient….[an] elegant web.”
- Max Davidson, The Mail on Sunday

“a potent and evocative modern-day fable.”
- Alastair Mabbott, The Herald (Glasgow)

“Sijie's ambitious work spans a thousand years of Chinese history….[with] a rich repository of tales, traditions and sensibilities [the book's] theme of indeterminacy of meaning is braided into the clash between East and West….Sijie has a gift for the spectacular.”
- Chitralekhua Basu, Times Literary Supplement

“an unlikely love affair twists and turns through Dai’s story….but it is the stops along the way, in which we visit the lost and unforgiven of Chinese history, that give the novel its real meaning….the knotty truths of China’s past are habitually ironed out by ‘official’ historiography, whether it is compiled by the communists or shot in Technicolor by western filmmakers. The result is a collective memory shot through with holes, and Dai’s pantheon of anti-heroes and forgotten souls is an attempt to patch the gaps….Once on a Moonless Night evokes the past with all the eerie clarity of a dream, its outlines blurred, but every tiny, telling detail extraordinarily alive. Anyone in search of a brief history of China would do well to begin right here.”
- Margaret Hillenbrand, Financial Times

“Once on a Moonless Night takes the reader deeper, into stories within stories and myths within myths about China’s real and imaginary past….Startling undercurrents sway this mysterious narrative: Dai Sijie’s inventiveness enfolds it in some extreme stories….show how language, which we (and many modern Chinese) think of as free, may be treacherous and incomplete….this shy, complex novel, which speaks its concerns so quietly, remains a forceful lament, infused with incident and dramatic storytelling.”
- Julian Evans, The Daily Telegraph

“Dai Sijie is a wonderful storyteller….Once on a Moonless Night is full of tales within tales and worlds within worlds, ranging from ancient Chinese empires through communist China to modern Beijing….Everything in all these interwoven tales is extreme, from intellectual obsession to the cruelty of empresses, from the mountain landscapes to cabbages….Sijie writes wonderful descriptions….There is always a sense of the pressure of numbers of people and things, which seems to provoke in the characters a ferocious determination to be individuals, to make their own fates, single-mindedly. Places and events are shocking….the reader feels a readerly excitement, even pleasure, as he or she is swept along from disaster to disaster.”
- As Byatt, The Guardian

“remarkable….the detail of the novel is so enthralling, the descriptions of old Peking so vivid, the picture of the labour camp and the lives of the wretched prisoners so compelling — worthy to set beside Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of the Gulag….an evocation of lost civilizations, of the artistic inheritance of China, and of Buddhist philosophy. For the Western reader this is as magical as it is strange….Its evocation of the distant world of devoted Chinese scholarship and dying artistry is lovingly and enchantingly done, while the contrast with the brutal politics of Communist China and its contempt for decency and human life is as memorable as it is disturbing. It’s a novel which demands effort from the reader, but the effort is richly rewarded.”
- Allan Massie, The Scotsman


Praise from France:
“Erudite, complex, ambitious, the best novel by the celebrated Dai Sijie....a sophisticated and urgent book.”
- Livres Hebdo

“an homage to language…an erudite novel filled with poetry...and wit”
- Le Figaro

“Throughout the book, Dai Sijie mixes the splendor, culture and scholarship of…ancient China with the horror of contemporary China.”
- Le Quotidien

“A beautiful meditation on language and man.”
- La vie
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Acclaimed novelist Sijie has written another novel that has already caused a stir in France. Narrated by an unnamed Western student in China in the 1970s, the story begins centuries before, with the Emperor Huizong, a calligrapher and great art collector, who acquired a silk scroll with a Buddhist sutra written upon it in an ancient lost language. The last emperor of Japan inherits the scroll and then in 1952, Paul d'Ampère, a French linguist, becomes obsessed with translating the scroll and goes to prison for 25 years for illegally acquiring it. When the narrator falls in love with a greengrocer, Tumchooq, who tells her the story, she begins to witness the life-altering consequences of the scroll—consequences that will change her own life and send her on a journey to seek truth and understanding. Sijie's breathtaking story shows the beauty and horrors that make up China's history while the poetry of Sijie's words is revealed in Hunter's magnificent translation. It's fitting that a story of a love affair with language should be written so beautifully. (Aug.)
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文摘 1

Let's call it the mutilated relic, this scrap of sacred text, written in a long-dead language, on a roll of silk which fell victim to a violent fit of anger and was torn in two, not by a pair of hands or a knife or scissors but quite genuinely by the teeth of an enraged emperor.

My chance meeting with Professor Tang Li sometime in mid-July 1978 in a conference room of the Peking Hotel, and what he revealed to me about that treasure, both shine out to this day like a little square of light in the hazy and confused labyrinth that my memories of China have become.

For the first time in my life I was being paid in my capacity as interpreter in a meeting set up by a Hollywood production company to discuss the screenplay of The Last Emperor, which went on to be the major film that everyone knows, garlanded with nine or ten Oscars and generating astronomical box office takings. With permission from the University of Peking, where I was enrolled in the Chinese literature department as a foreign student, and armed with a notebook bought the day before specially for the occasion, I made my way to the Peking Hotel in the middle of a summer afternoon so hot it vaporised everything, turning the city into a cauldron steadily stewing its population. Creaking their last, my bicycle wheels sank into the cloying asphalt, softened by the heat and giving off little spirals of blue smoke. The foyer of the eight-storey hotel (the city's only skyscraper at the time) was overflowing with excited activity, the revolving glass door besieged by a noisy succession of fifty, a hundred, two hundred people, I couldn't tell. Judging by their accents they had come from every corner of China. Parents laden with provisions and children carrying violin cases on their backs and, despite the heat, wearing Western-style blazers with white shirts buttoned up to the neck and ties or bow ties, even though some of them were barely six or seven years old. As soon as each child ap
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