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