Amour dans une vallée enchantée by Wang Anyi

Amour dans une vallée enchantée Reviews

• 
  Louise

  J'ai été touchée par ce court roman chinois. Une femme est prise dans une vie maritale décevante, mais elle est invitée à passer une semaine dans une vallée touristique du Lushan pour des conférences professionnelles. Dix jours hors de ce quotidien pesant, où elle va rencontrer un homme et où ils vont tomber amoureux l'un de l'autre. Ça n’est pas un amour de carte postale, ces deux âmes (elles n’ont même pas de prénoms) marchent à l’unisson (presque) sans une parole, regard et contact physique. Elles se trouvent et communient ainsi.
  L’écriture est très cinématographique, avec des descriptions précises qui moi m’ont projetées dans le corps et les sensations de cette femme mélancolique et rêveuse. C’est une rêverie couchée sur le papier, honnêtement j’aurai adoré lire (et encore plus écrire, mais qui suis-je!) cette romance poétique mais minutieuse à l’adolescence, quand mon imagination me poussait dans ce genre de recoin sentimental. On sent typiquement que l’autrice a fait le compte-rendu de ses fantasmes les plus élaborés.
  Pour moi la grande beauté de cette histoire, c’est l’exaltation imaginative que déploie la jeune femme, qui prend aussi conscience que cette histoire est évanescente : elle déploie alors des stratagèmes pour faire vivre leur romance éthérée (le regard qu’elle sent sur elle, les fils de soie qui les relient, sa personnalité qu’elle module). Cette parenthèse n’a pas vocation à se réaliser, l’espoir est plus beau que la réalité, et si cette vérité est difficile à accepter, elle sait au fond d’elle que c’est la seule façon de garder la puissance de cette histoire dans son coeur.
  La vallée montagneuse qui subit les assauts régulier du brouillard est un personnage à part entière : elle aide les amants à communiquer, les retire du monde prosaïque puis les fait communier. Cette aura mystique permet de déployer de magnifiques images… le seul regret que j’ai c’est l’écriture, un peu en deçà du fond, mais c’est dur de reprocher ce point à une autrice traduite du chinois.
  C’est plutôt rare que j’accroche aux histoires d’amour mais les amants de la Vallée enchantée resteront longtemps parmi mes préférées.
• 
  Louise

  Après avoir été touchée par Amour dans une vallée enchantée, j'ai voulu poursuivre la trilogie... par le plus sulfureux, qui décrit l'histoire de rage et de désir entre deux danseurs d'une compagnie théâtrale, pendant la Révolution Culturelle. Grosse déception : comme dans le premier opus, les personnages sont évanescents, sans expression ni dialogues. On décrit méticuleusement leurs faits et gestes, leurs attitudes et leurs émotions. Mais c'est plat, triste et lugubre. Aucune sensualité ne se dégage, on est même écoeuré par certaines descriptions. L'intrigue ne m'a offert aucun sens : pourquoi se fuient-ils, pourquoi ont-ils honte, pourquoi cette haine, cette violence... Les ellipses sont frustrantes et le temps de la narration s'écoule étrangement. Je n'en retiendrai rien.
• 
  Marie

  I Didn't get it. Incredibly bland and boring.
• 
  David

  This is the third book by Wang Anyi that I have read and I enjoyed the least, I do not speak or read Chinese, but from reading the two previous books, Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Brocade Valley (or Love in A Beauteous Valley as this translator calls it) this translation lacks the flow of language of the other two books I've read. That being said Wang Anyi once again captures the feel of the small town where the story takes place and the reality of both protagonists. I felt as if they were my neighbors.
  
  Her descriptions are so real, as they were of Shanghai in Song of Everlasting Sorrow and the three location in Brocade Valley that I felt as if I have lived there and she was describing place I had visited, which is true of Shanghai. Her lovers in this book and in Brocade Valley are real people, with real lives, even though we are only seeing them as lovers, we are given to understand the rest of their lives outside the confines of the novel. I can imagine myself walking down the streets of the town in all four seasons and meeting either the man or the woman and being able to have a knowledgeable conversation with them.
  
  I was especially taken in this novel with her description of both internal feelings and the interaction of the lovers as they move through their relationship. Not only is language poetic, even in this translation, but also real and heartfelt.
  
  I think that Wang Anyi is a brilliant writer and storyteller and look forward to reading her Lapse of Time next.
• 
  NoID

  Parfois, on passe à côté d’un livre, on arrive pas à y entrer. On voit bien qu’il y a quelque chose, mais la porte résiste.
  
  
  
  Un petit échec donc, que cette histoire de jeune danseuse et jeune danseur. Je ne comprenais pas ce que je lisais et après avoir insisté, repris, continué jusqu’au bout… Je n’en ai rien retenu
  
  
  
  
  https://www.noid.ch/amour-dans-une-pe...
• 
  Izabel ✨️

  Je me suis ennuyée mais alors ennuyée ! et pourtant j'ai persisté jusqu'à la fin mais honnêtement il ne se passe rien. C'est 147 pages d'introspection sur soi, de frustrations, de rien. Il y a quand même de beaux passages, l'écriture n'est pas déplaisante donc c'est assez frustrant.
  
  
• 
  Nancy Zigler

  Really beautiful, sad. Also disturbing. A perfect ending.
• 
  tomasawyer

  J'espérais une histoire d'amour passionnée entre deux danseurs mais je n'ai vu qu'un livre humide et triste sentant la sueur, rythmé par des scènes de tabassage et de dysenterie.
• 
  Larou

  I think I read one French book in the last two years, and as a result, my French might have gotten a bit rusty. And as it turns out, reading a novel that consists mainly of dense descriptions is not the best way to get back into a language. Who would have thought?
  
  In a generous estimate, I think I probably understood three quarters of the novel – but this being, precisely, a novel, the semantically murky final quarter was most likely the most important part – the nuances and shades of meaning, the things not said but inferred, the whole comet’s tail of connotations trailing after the various images the novel deploys. In consequence, this post should be taken with an even larger pinch of salt than usual as it is pretty much certain I missed a lot here.
  
  As is clear from the title onwards, this novels is a love story – and it probably was a good idea of Anyi Wang to point this out in the title, or else people might not have guessed from her novel alone. The author goes to great lengths to make the relationship between her protagonists as unromantic as possible – they are very unlike each other (mentally as well as physically), they barely communicate with each other verbally (in fact, the whole novel has almost no dialogue at all), they fight with each other almost as much as they make love to each other (to the point where the one becomes almost indistinguishable from the other), and more than once the reader is beset by the strong suspicion that they do not even like each other. And yet, there is an undeniable attraction between them, an attraction that maybe is all the stronger because it manifests itself in spite of the people it connects. This is the story of a veritable amour fou, then, and it’s probably not a surprise that it appears to only have been translated into French.
  
  The novel’s protagonists – who, as far as I can remember, are never named, but remain simply “she” and “he” throughout the novel – are dancers in a ballet troupe based in a small Chinese village; the translator’s in addition foreword informs us that it is taking place during the cultural revolution (not something I would have noticed for myself, but… see above). They are both somewhat outsiders, not particularly likeable, and would be nothing special if it wasn’t for their physical form, the girl being unusually large and the boy being unusually small. This already indicates that Anyi Wang is not going to stick with traditional expectations, and as it turns out, she is not sticking with any expectations at all – I suspect she might have set out writing the novel with the purpose of writing an Anti-Romance; and while she certainly succeeded with that, I could not help the feeling that in parts she was rather overdoing it with the breaking of Romantic patterns, to the point where I had to forcefully remind myself that I was supposed to be reading a love story.
  
  Almost everything that happens in this slim novel happens on the physical plane – there is no touching of minds here, but a continued series of colliding bodies. And that is to be taken quite literally – the protagonists hurl their bodies against each other, flail, bump, scratch, kiss, bite, fuck and explore pretty much every single form of bodily contact that is physically possible. Emotions do run high, but they are almost never given expression in verbal form – love, this novel seems to say, is not a meeting of like souls in harmony but is continuous, fierce struggle between bodies that are ineluctably drawn to each other even against the conscious will of the minds inhabiting them.
  
  Unfortunately – and here I am stepping onto really thin ice, because of my limited comprehension of the language – the novel seems to resort a bit too much to telling rather than showing which robs it of some of the impact it otherwise might have had. There is a distant, almost detached tone to the narrative over long stretches which I think fits ill with the purely physical nature of the relationship depicted in it. However, those passages alternate with beautiful, vivid descriptions which give the novel an intensity which seems appropriate to its subject matter. On the other hand, this switching between a more distanced and a more immediate narrative tonality might very well have been intentional and might very well work for someone who is more familiar with the French language (or who even is able to read the novel in its original Chinese) than me. And even I liked the novel sufficiently that I might seek out the other two novels of the trilogy Amour dans une petite ville is apparently part of.
• 
  David

  This a short novel, beautifully written/translated and deserves 3.5*'s maybe even 3.75*'s. . It is a very interesting story of a book editor and her adventure and a week long conference of writers, editors and publishers. A married woman she becomes very attracted to a writer, what actually happens between them, other than a mutual attraction is left unclear, and whether this is real or a dream/story by the editor is also left to your imagination. The descriptive passage of Lushan and of the interaction of the editor and both her husband and her "lover" are beautiful.....
• 
  Elie

  The sensibility of this book moved me. After having finished my reading I immediately recommended it to my mother, and she liked it as well.
  
• 
  R.K. Cowles

  3 1/2 stars
• 
  David

  Not so much a love story as a story of love.
• 
  Everett

  A great romance middle brow fiction piece.