The Lost Garden: A Novel

by Ang Li, Sylvia Lin , Ph.D. (Translator), Howard Goldblatt (Translator)

Overview

The Lost Garden is an eloquent portrait of the losses incurred as we struggle to hold on to our passions. The novel begins with the family of Zhu Yinghong, whose father, Zhu Zuyan, was imprisoned in the early days of Chiang Kai-shek's rule. Zhu Zuyan spends his days luxuriating in his Lotus Garden, which he builds according to his own desires. Forever under suspicion, he indulges as much as he can in circumscribed pleasures, though they drain the family fortune. Eventually the entire household is sold, including the Lotus Garden. The novel then swings to modern-day Taipei, where Zhu Yinghong falls for Lin Xigeng, a real estate tycoon and playboy. Their cat-and-mouse courtship builds against the extravagant banquets and decadent entertainments of Taipei's wealthy businessmen. Though the two ultimately marry, their high-styled romance dulls over time, leading to a dangerous, desperate quest to reclaim the enchantment of the Lotus Garden.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231540322
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	11/24/2015
Series:	Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Li Ang, the pen name of Shih Shu-tuan, is also the author of the award-winning The Butcher's Wife. A prolific writer and astute social critic, she was honored by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication with its Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres award, and a modern dance based on her short story was shortlisted for Der Faust Prize.

Sylvia Li-chun Lin, formerly associate professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame, translates contemporary Chinese fiction from Taiwan and China.

Howard Goldblatt, a Guggenheim Fellow, is an internationally renowned translator of Chinese fiction, including the novels of Mo Yan, the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Table of Contents

What Separates Us from China
Translator's Note
The Lost Garden

Editorial Reviews

A beautifully written novel, from a prominent and prolific Taiwanese writer, including multiple themes of love, gender, sex, capitalism, as well as ethnic identity and Taiwan's historical and political memory. This expertly executed translation is long overdue.

Yenna Wu

Encoded with an impressive array of tantalizing allegorical meanings, complete with a fantastical re-envisioning of Taiwan's local history and its ancestral ties with China, Li Ang's The Lost Garden has often been read as a political parable. Yet the novel boasts other arresting features as well, among them the author's daring treatment of female sexuality—taken here as the core of the relentless war between the sexes—in the mise en scène of a modish urban romance.

Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang

The lush, descriptive narrative immerses the reader in the humid garden of the title that sits at the core of the novel, standing for history, desire, and family.

World Literature Today

This novel's dense sensuality—from its tropical flora to its frenetic lust—weaves time and space into mesmerizing patterns, like the looping paths of the title garden itself.

Joseph Allen

Stories of an old Chinese garden replanted with native Taiwanese species, a sultry island with a buried past, and liaisons between old money and nouveau riche hint at torrid energies and hidden traps in Taiwan's postwar past.

Jeffrey Kinkley

A knowing and astute novel.

Taipei Times - Bradley Winterton

Lin and Goldblatt's translation of The Lost Garden is a significant accomplishment that succeeds in presenting this masterpiece to English readers.... Li's portrayal of post-World War II Taiwan is both sophisticated and penetrating.

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Striking in its ambitious reach and political slant.... The Lost Garden is a distinctive contribution to the literature of place, and its translation into English gives welcome access to a country and culture often obscured by its neighbours, China and Japan.

Times Literary Supplement - Francesca Rhydderch

Ably translated... a consistently compelling read.

Midwest Book Review

2015-09-03
Yinghong, a Taiwanese woman, struggles with an all-consuming love for a magnetic businessman while remembering her gentle, unconventional father, who was imprisoned for dissident views. In this novel, originally published in 1990, Ang (The Butcher's Wife, 1983, etc.) contrasts a naïve young girl's relationship with her protective, kindly father and her later sexual obsession with a much colder man. Ang sketches both men clearly. Yinghong's father, Zhu Zuyan, validates and encourages his timid daughter, helping her acquire knowledge fitting for a member of a gentry family. Lin Xigeng, on the other hand, is a regular in the seamy world of Taiwan nightlife and is headstrong and materialistic. He represents the new Taiwan, one economically on the move, while Zhu was caught up in the violent repression of the early days of Chiang Kai-shek's rule. Yinghong suffers a lasting trauma when she sees her father abducted by brutish soldiers. Zhu is returned to the family because of his poor health and takes refuge in the Lotus Garden of the book's title, which Ang renders in delicate, often compelling detail that also occasionally bogs the narrative down. Once the back-and-forth, past-to-present structure of the book is established, it begins to feel as if the flashbacks are mostly desultory episodes rather than events that develop the characters' qualities. But in Zhu, Ang has created a character the reader genuinely cares about—we feel his warmth and intelligence, and Yinghong's great love for him makes sense. Still, it's the present-day story that seems more intriguing. Ang circles around it tantalizingly, describing Yinghong's dreamy fall into erotic obsession with delicate precision and creating suspense with implications that Lin is a far darker character than he at first appears. This suspense doesn't entirely pay off, and though the novel's separate elements aren't always woven into a satisfying whole, they're often written with such grace that they offer incidental pleasures. Lin is superb at writing sex scenes, and there are many in this book. She is also a keen observer of plant life. An exploration of contemporary Taiwan through the lens of the past, this novel hits many poignant notes as it threads its way.

Kirkus Reviews