New Confucian Forest Chronicle. Reading in the Ming Dynasty

Author: Mai Dong Zhang Qi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: Emerging writer, full effort, ancient stories, modern reinterpretation. Before Fan Jin passed the imperial examination and after Zhou Jin left the officialdom, what did they do? The Story of the Scholars didn't tell the readers. This book does. This book contains three stories: Reading in the Ming Dynasty tells the story of Fan Jin and his associates—his teacher Wang Bochuan, his father Fan Xing, his wife Hu Hanzhi, his father-in-law Hu Tuofu, and his classmate Wei Haozu—whose lives are in a state of confusion and anxiety amidst dazzling scenes before Fan Jin passed the imperial examination. In The Personal Prison, the protagonist Zhou Jin builds a prison that unsettles the entire village. The prison doesn't hold any real prisoners, but it mimics a prison structure. Zhou Jin imprisons a pack of wolves and a group of figurine statues cast from villagers' portraits, including his own. The novel is enigmatic, filled with danger, distrust, and inescapable loneliness. In My Lover Nie Xiaoqian, the Confucian scholar Ning Caichen faces a situation where the female ghost Nie Xiaoqian appears as an anomaly in his life. He brings her back into the real world, and as a result, the relationships between him, Nie Xiaoqian, his mother, his wife, his friends, and the villagers undergo subtle changes.