Lapse of Time by Wang Anyi

Lapse of Time Reviews

• 
  Inderjit Sanghera

  The stories which form part of this collection act as snapshots into the lives of the characters are they navigate the at times dreary and decadent society of China just as it is in the thrones of revolution and change. Anyi is able to depict the banal, quotidian events which make up their lives and turn them into something almost transcendent, such as in 'And the Rain Patters On', where a lachrymose young woman is roused out of her romantic stupor by the appearance of a young man who offers her a ride on the back of his bicycle. The atmosphere Anyi is able to create resembles the mood of the young woman who the story focuses on, etiolated and incandescent beneath the ceaseless patter of rain, the story largely takes place in the imagination of the young woman as she reminisces about her relationship with the young man, whose presence acts as a break from the sense of boredom which has taken over her life.
  
  Otherwise Anyi deftly explores various aspects of human frailty, from the sense of selfishness which divides a family in 'The Destination' to the internal politics of a travelling cultural troupe in 'The Stage, A Miniature World'. If anything the longest story, 'Lapse of Time' is the weakest in the collection, as it meanders to its conclusion, whereas Anyi's real strength lies in her ability to capture the lives of her characters in shorter, more condensed stories. Whilst lacking the artistic genius of her opus 'The Song of Everlasting Sorrow', her stories often contain little nuggets of beauty which, just like her characters, can be overlooked if the reader doesn't look carefully enough;
  
  "The rain, misting down. is again making a low swishing sound. It washes the road clean and bright, lighting up the fresh, sky-blue, murmuring world."
• 
  Aubrey

  3.5/5

  The Destination - 4/5
  And the Rain Patters On - 2/5
  Life in a Small Courtyard - 2.5/5
  The Stage, a Miniature World - 3/5
  The Base of the Wall - 3.5/5
  Between Themselves - 3.5/5
  Lapse of Time - 3/5

  A few years back, I took advantage of my last year of undergrad to ransack the university library for every single underread/rated work by a woman of color that even slightly intrigued me and read as many as was humanly possible during a full load of upper div English courses during the school year and 40 hour work weeks otherwise. Wang Anyi's
  The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai was one of the absolute gems that that all too brief period of revelatory work rewarded me with, so when this showed up at one sale or another, I grabbed it without a second thought. The not insignificant difference in my reception of this compared to that of the novel can of course be chalked up to usual arbitrary persnickities, such as my bias towards novels and the fact that each of the five short stories and the one novella had their own translator. However, I imagine the biggest difference was the age, seeing as how this collections include all but one of Wang's earliest works, all written between twenty to thirty years before the aforementioned novel that has been proclaimed a modern classic by those far more fluently erudite than myself. In any case, Wang has a lot more where that came from in terms of what's been translated into English, so all I need is someone to get their stuff together and release another compendium all of her own already. Let's not encourage Anglo types to only read Chinese works when the author's a Nobel Laureate, yes?
  
  Part of what I appreciated most about Wang's novel all those years ago was how invested it was in a city, its people, its history, the sort of authorial control akin to the jeweler turning a gem to meet the light, refracting one event, one memory, one significance, then another, with only the slightest heed paid to single individual interiority or linear flow of time. You'd start a sentence that'd become a paragraph that'd become a page that become the full daily page allotment, and what you found yourself interested in was technically a person, but only when they were cocooned, crystallized, and finally choreographed into their role in the living, breathing holism that was an urban landscape ponderously moving through the shuddering upheavals of history threatening to engulf it. That's a tall order to fill under any writing circumstance, and there's been many a time when I myself found works that attempted such far too apolitical as consequence for my tastes. For whatever reason, Wang is an exception, and while I saw bits and pieces of what magnificence was eventually to develop, especially in the first story of this collection, too many of the works grounded themselves too much in cut and dry expectations of rise, climax, conclusion, character traits, character development, facts, figures, historical context, all jostling around without that smoothly enticing and ultimately indescribable narratological cohesion that would bless Wang's writing a few decades later. The worst of it was the all too pat happy ending or moral lesson or personal revelation that would come right on time in the last few pages, cause if there's nothing I so dislike, it's self help manuals masquerading as literature. Not the Christian kind that seems to seep into everything these days for once, but still. Get thee behind me and all that jazz.
  
  It's nearly the end of Women in Translation Month 2020, and Wang Anyi's one of five previously read authors whom I've managed to revisit, with a sixth and final one to be slipped in at the last minute. French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese to be started up after I finish this work: seven original languages powering a total of eleven written works. Overall, the works have made for a comfortable stretching of my brain that just can't be matched by most Anglo works, but while quality is always preferable to quantity, there's no arguing with an empty book stack, so I'm content to switch my focus to other pastures and let this particularly concentrated area replenish itself. Involving myself in the Twitter scene this year more heavily than I have done in the past meant subjecting myself to a sizable amount of advertising, sometimes of the obtusely exploitative sort, but there were enough regular human beings on there reading, writing, and translating to make for a nice community experience amongst the wildfire and the plague. In any case, it's not over the top to say, using Wang Anyi as an example, that there is a wealth of women writers who, for whatever reason, have barely anything translated into English, and far more who have nothing whatsoever. Until that's done, my particularly Anglo-dunderheaded self will have to sit and make do with what I can get: one eye rapidly skimming the ridiculously familiar, the other poised to pick out that hint of a work that represents a mere 1% of the Anglo publishing market. I'd obviously be welcome to authors who have previously served me well, but luck-of-the-draw picks have at least given me experience in various areas of world literature where they haven't engaged or astounded, and I so rarely come across promising works of the WIT variety that it's rather silly to pass them by. I don't expect another Wang to show up this weekend when I do another used bookstore run, as I don't think any other Anglo publications of hers exist, but one never can know.

  Her mother-in-law's face softened a bit as she sipped her tea. She was beginning to feel better about the family's terrible political background.
• 
  David

  
  I remain a big fan of Wang Anyi, but my big problem with this collection of 11 stories, some short, some not so short is that they were uneven, which may be that they all have different translators and that makes a big difference. The collection is published by the Foreign Language Press of Beijing. The title story is wonderful and the translation by Howard Goldblatt is excellent. I found the protagonist a fascinated and very real person. Her life as the daughter-in-law in a wealthy family reveals a small part of Chinese history from just before the Cultural Revolution the the years following it. It followed the blossoming of her true strength and understanding of the world around her I also enjoyed Life in a Small Courtyard translated by Hu Zhihui. I sort of liked the final story Miaomiao, but was troubled by the translation which did not reflect the usual poetic writing of Wang Anyi.
• 
  Usha Hegde

  You can really get a glimpse of life in China. Style is superb.