A Floating Life - Hardcover

Elegant, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880015594 ISBN 13: 9780880015592

Publisher: Ecco, 1999

Synopsis

History and legend combine in Simon Elegant's bawdy "autobiographical" account of China's famed rabble-rousing versemaker Li Po.
On a lavishly outfitted river barge in ancient China, a studious young vintner's son takes down the life story of the extraordinary Tang Dynasty poet-in-exile, none other than the "Banished Immortal" himself, the great Li Po. Each day, the young man sits with brush, ink, and scroll and meticulously records the outlandish adventures that Li Po (with flask of warm rice wine always in hand) recalls: his ride on the back of an enormous eagle; his work for a brutal butcher as a Pigboy-in-training; his role as advisor to Emperor Hsuan Tsung (in matters of cock-fighting and tree-climbing, not of state); and his recurring encounters with the glorious Peony, a high courtesan and the finest singer in the land.
Li Po rails against all that conspires to constrain him: the philosophy of "that pietistic old prater Confucius," the elaborate rules governing the composition of verse, the rigid examinations required to obtain an official post, and the greedy emperors whose expansionism leads China into a period of rebellion and catastrophe.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Elegant is an editor and writer for the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Reviews

Historical fiction about a legendary literary rascal, in a first novel by a Hong Kongbased editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review . Thirteen centuries ago, the Chinese poet Li Po pursued life with a ferocious appetite, being both admired for his verse and notorious for his untrammelled behavior at the court of the Emperor Hsuan Tsung and, later, on the loose pursuing his fortune in the T'ang Dynastyera countryside. Writing in the roisterous spirit of the story's hero, Elegant probes the mythology of the poet in a series of linked tales told in the first person by Li Po to Wang Lung, who is the poet's cringing yet dogged young amanuensis. These stories are especially engrossing when they're most earthy and ribald--for instance, when the illustrious versifier, temporarily down and out, takes a job working as an assistant for a mute and ailing butcher's minion at a pig slaughterhouse. The tale of the doleful downfall of the exploited minion, Pigboy, and the sad lot of his hopeless animal victims (whom he secretly respects and loves) is visceral, violent, and unmercifully moving, a transparently moral and emotional interlude in a chronicle otherwise filled with purely rambunctious action. The structural looseness of Elegant's historical re-creation is appropriate to the picaresque genre, and yet a lack of depth in the author's portrayal of his protagonist does limit the book's impact and imaginative reach. As a wanton and a renegade, Li Po is great fun, but he's also somewhat narrowly drawn; it's hard to sympathize very much with a guy who's shown over and over again to be fundamentally foolish and stereotypically naughty. In the end, Elegant's work seems an entertaining piece of exotica that deliberately avoids deeper things, depending instead on cheekiness and some ingenious flourishes. The story of an ancient Chinese prototype of Charles Bukowski. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Elegant draws on his background as China scholar and arts and society editor for the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review to craft a richly embellished "autobiographical" novel of T'ang dynasty poet Li Po. As the novel opens, a boy named Wang has been sent by his father to serve as amanuensis to the great poet, who wants to tell his life story. Wang discovers a larger-than-life character who has drunk himself into a stupor at a great celebration on a river barge yet is robustly at work the next morning. His dictation turns into a wildly inventive torrent of escapades, from his flight on the back of an eagle as a young boy to his encounter with the emperor. Throughout, Li Po remains a vivid, raucous presence, and his story is told in language as gorgeous, delicate, and precise as one would find in one of his poems, "Ah, this floating life, like a dream" wrote Li Po. The novel is a dream, too. Highly recommended.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0880015594
• ISBN 13: 9780880015592
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312