The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is the story of a Shanghai woman whose adult life starts by starring in a beauty pageant and ends in poverty. It’s always difficult to appreciate translated work. This novel mixes lyrical descriptions (not my cup of tea, admittedly) with stilted considerations on how women must submit to men (not my cup of tea either, even given the period) and with a trite story of how choosing or being chosen for money is not the key to happiness — to an end result of boredom but strangely affecting interest in what happens to the heroin.
It must be better in Chinese.
