Tu Men (Commentary Edition)

Author: Jia Pingwa (Original), Mu Tao (Commentary)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-06-01
Features: The joy of reading ends with reading. If you write a "book review" of what you've read, much of the joy of reading is lost. And if you read a book with the purpose of writing a review, the situation is truly like an ugly woman getting married—it's both trampled by others and tramples others in the process. Therefore, writing book reviews is essentially a mutually destructive task.
Commentary, however, is a different matter altogether. It's like watching a beautiful woman from the corner of an alley—among the flurry of glances, you only focus on the one that strikes you or pay attention to the parts that resonate with you, picking and choosing freely, without regard for quantity. But commentary also has its taboos, as Mr. Jin Shengtan once said, "If one wishes to pass on the essence of a work alone, it's like drawing only half a beauty, which is highly laughable."
"Tumen" is the thinnest of Jia Pingwa's novels, yet I consider it a great work. When it was published in 1996, I chatted with him for several days, but it seemed to receive little response from the reading community at the time. By 1999, after the publication of his another novel, "Gao Laozhuang," the French translator of his novel "Pitu," Ms. Ambrolan (IMBOT--BICHET), called me asking for his new work. I casually included "Tumen" along with it. A month later, Ms. Ambrolan and STDCK Publishing decided to publish both books together, but they chose to translate "Tumen" first.