A low opinion of human nature

I feel slightly cornered by the blurbs on the jacket of this book. On the front, Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, says, ‘This is my favourite Chinese novel: a highly amusing comedy of manners that conceals a powerful emotional charge.’ On the back, Lisa Appignanesi suggests we ‘imagine Svevo taking David Lodge to China and bumping into Confucius who had just finished reading Balzac’. In the foreword, Yale’s Jonathan Spence calls Fortress Besieged ‘a novel of originality and spirit, of wit and integrity, one that has clearly earned its place amongst the masterworks of 20th-century Chinese literature’.

I don’t think the novel is highly amusing — I didn’t think so in 1974, either, when this English translation was first published in America — and I don’t know what Lisa Appignanesi is talking about. Chinese fiction in the last century was at best interesting or informative, with occasional flashes of wit or drama.