Once on a Moonless Night
Dai Sijie, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307456731
Summary
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'Ampère, 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'Ampère 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 2, 1954
• Where—Chengu, Sichuan, China
• Education—re-education camp
• Awards—Prix Femina, 2003
• Currently—lives in Paris, France
• Occupation—filmmaker and novelist
Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a filmmaker who was himself “re-educated” between 1971 and 1974.
He left China in 1984 for France, where he has lived and worked ever since. Blazac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, his first novel, is semi-autobiographical; it was an overnight sensation when it appeared in France in 2000, becoming an immediate best-seller and winning five prizes. Rights to the novel have been sold in nineteen countries.
His second novel, Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch won the French Prix Femina award in 2003. Once on a Moonless Night was published in 2007 (English trans., 2009) (From the publisher.)
More
Because Dai Sijie came from an educated middle-class family, the Maoist government sent him to a reeducation camp in rural Sichuan from 1971 to 1974, during the Cultural Revolution. After his return, he was able to complete high school and university, where he studied art history.
In 1984, he left China for France on a scholarship. There, he acquired a passion for movies and became a director. Before turning to writing, he made three critically-acclaimed feature-length films: China, My Sorrow (1989) (original title: Chine, ma douleur), Le mangeur de lune and Tang, le onzième. He also wrote and directed an adaptation of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, released in 2002. He lives in Paris and writes in French.
A new novel, Par une nuit où la lune ne s'est pas levée (Once on a Moonless Night), appeared in 2007 (and in English in 2009).
L'acrobatie aérienne de Confucius was released in 2008.
Novels
His first book, the semi-autobiographical Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress) (2000), was made into a 2002 movie, which he himself adapted and directed. It recounts the story of a pair of friends who become good friends with a local seamstress while spending time in a countryside village, where they have been sent for 're-education' during the Cultural Revolution. They steal a suitcase filled with classic Western novels from another man being reeducated, and decide to enrich the seamstress' life by exposing her to great literature. These novels also serve to sustain the two companions during this difficult time. The story principally deals with the cultural universality of great literature and its redeeming power. The novel has been translated into twenty-five languages, and finally into his mother tongue after the movie adaptation.
His second book, Le Complexe de Di won the Prix Femina for 2003. It recounts the travels of a Chinese man whose philosophy has been influenced by French psychoanalyst thought. The title is a play on "le complexe d'Oedipe", or "the Oedipus complex". The English translation (released in 2005) is titled Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch. ("More" from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
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.
A.S. Byatt - Guardian (UK)
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 (UK)
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 (UK)
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.
Publishers Weekly
"Once on a moonless night a lone man is traveling..." and, stumbling, clings to the side of an abyss. No, this doesn't actually happen in Dai's magisterial new work; it's reputedly the beginning of a lost Buddhist sutra, written on a scrap of silk belonging to China's last emperor. As Dai would have it, the exiled emperor tosses it from a plane, and the daughter of the man who claims it is pursued by French linguist Paul d'Ampere—he's fascinated because the sutra is written in the lost language of Tumchooq. Their son, named Tumchooq, keeps the story of the sutra alive and shares it with a Western student who becomes obsessed with it—and pregnant with Tumchooq's child. Dai's latest is structurally more complex than his international hit, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, whose power lies partly in its singular clarity. But it's just as rich and evocative and powerfully delivers the idea that language (even more than literature, as in Balzac) truly defines us. This should be almost as big as Balzac; highly recommended.
Library Journal
A scroll containing a Buddhist sutra written in an unknown language causes no end of trouble in Sijie's meandering novel (Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch, 2005, etc.). The unnamed narrator, a French student of Chinese literature at the University of Peking, first hears of the mysterious sutra in 1978, when she is acting as a translator during a meeting about The Last Emperor. Puyi, the subject of that film, inherited the second- or third-century scroll, which resided in the collection of a 12th-century emperor-and anyone who thinks that description is opaque should try reading the longwinded account given to the narrator by an elderly Chinese historian. When Puyi was taken prisoner by the Japanese, the historian says, he tore the scroll in half and flung both halves from the plane. Now the narrator backtracks to describe her meeting with Tumchooq, a vegetable seller on a street near the university, whose name is also the name of the ancient language in which the Buddhist scroll was written. Paul d'Ampere, the French scholar who figured this out in 1952, just happens to be Tumchooq's father; indeed, he may have married Tumchooq's mother, now a curator at the museum of the Forbidden City, to get his hands on the half of the scroll that her elderly relative picked up after it was flung from the plane. D'Ampere ends up in prison; his death there a quarter-century later sends Tumchooq into self-imposed exile. The narrator aborts his baby and returns to France, but soon she's learning new languages and traveling again, for no discernable reason except to make sure that she picks up Tumchooq's trail again in Burma in 1990. He's still looking for the complete text of the sutra, but the missing portion won't surface until after Tumchooq has been arrested and deported to Laos. By then, only the most patient readers will care. Intended to celebrate the art of storytelling, this tedious work merely illustrates the perils of authorial self-indulgence.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is this book about? What are Dai's major themes?
2. Who is the narrator? What do we know about her? Do you like her?
3. On pages 31-32, Professor Tang Li describes Puyi's fascination with an ancient language made up purely of nouns: “No verbs, therefore no concerns.” What does this mean? Why did Puyi conflate verbs with concerns?
4. Discuss the role of language itself throughout the novel. Why does it hold such power for Paul d'Ampère? For Tumchooq? For the narrator?
5. The narrator states that filial love “lies at the heart of the Chinese moral code” (p. 59). Why is this significant?
6. How does the murder of White-Tuft change the course of the novel?
7. Why does Tumchooq tell the story of Mr. Liu (pp. 82-85)? What message is he trying to convey to the narrator? Why is Mr. Liu so important to him?
8. Discuss the incident with Ma at the Exhibition of Ancient Chinese Punishments and Tortures. Why did Tumchooq do what he did? And why does he tell the story the way he does? What does this scene say about truth and deception?
9. Is there such a thing as a true friend in this novel? What about Hu Feng?
10. How are women treated in the novel? Why aren't the narrator and Tumchooq's mother identified by name?
11. Is Tumchooq like his father? In what ways?
12. Why does Paul d'Ampère turn his back on France? Does the narrator? How does pride of country affect the events in the novel?
13. Reread Tumchooq's letter on page 175. Why does his father's death affect him so deeply?
14. Discuss the notion of choice. How does Dai distinguish “choice” from “decision”?
15. On pages 197-198, Mr. Tarakesa tells the narrator that d'Ampère couldn't find the scroll because he was a Westerner, that “finding the end of a teaching like that requires an entirely oriental mind.” Why is the narrator so taken aback? Where else does bigotry come into play? In this novel, does it work both ways?
16. Do you agree with the narrator's assertion, on page 202, that “in literature there is just one true masterpiece to which different writers give a particular form”? Do you think Dai agrees?
17. What is signified by d'Ampère's blank headstone? Do you agree with Tumchooq's interpretation on page 230?
18. Discuss the epilogue. What does it mean that Peking has changed so thoroughly?
19. What did you think of the revelation about Tumchooq's mother, on pages 268-69?
20. Reread the end of the sutra, the last lines of the novel. What is the significance?
21. Did the ending satisfy you? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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