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    Border Town: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Border Town: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Border Town: A Novel
    Ebook154 pages2 hours

    Border Town: A Novel

    By Congwen Shen and Jeffrey C. Kinkley

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    New in the Harper Perennial Modern Chinese Classics series, Border Town is a classic Chinese novel—banned by Mao’s regime—that captures the ideals of rural China through the moving story of a young woman and her grandfather. Originally published in 1934 by author Shen Congwen, this beautifully written novel tells the story of Cuicui, a young country girl who is coming of age in rural China in the tumultuous time before the communist revolution.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 1, 2009
    ISBN9780061959233
    Unavailable
    Border Town: A Novel

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    Reviews for Border Town

    3.5/5

    15 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      An odd and simple tale that defies classification, so I will call it a rural romance. Not a love story but a love of simple rural and village life depicted in the manner reminiscent of Chinese folk tales of unrequited and frustrated love.Basically, the story is simple, focusing on young Cuicui who is unable to transfer her adolescent affection for her grandfather into a maturing form of love for a young suitor. Their lives depend on the living her grandfather makes -- though he never charges his passengers -- as a ferryman who transports strangers and villagers across the river that separates them from town life. Cuicui increasingly acts in his stead.To me, their livelihood is a metaphor for their inability to go forward in life and representative of Cuicui's inability to choose between two potential husbands. Forward impulsion is replaced by back-and-forth routine. Congwen makes it clear that he admires and holds the people and way of life of rural ethnic Chinese to be superior to the lives of Han Chinese who were, at the time this book was written, embroiled in the Communist Revolution.There is no compelling reason to go out of your way to read this book, but it is worth exploration if you are, like me, interested in all the literary output of China. The mood of the novel is quiet, even subdued, and bucolic -- suitable to the subject. It is, oddly, hero-less and there are no villains, which makes it an internal psycho-drama with really very little drama.
    • 4/5
      Shen Congwen is one of pioneers of modern Chinese literature, and with Border Town - one of his most famous books, it is easy to see why. Falling under the "native soil" genre of writings, Shen describes in detail the daily lives of the villagers in a semi-fictional town in the author's home province of Hunan. A descriptively simple book, Shen has managed to paint a picture almost frozen in time, of China before the turmoil of the mid-twentieth century.