It did not take long for a different tone to be discernable in his lines. Incidentally, a new Chinese edition of Eliot came out about two years ago, including some of my translations, just like in Shanghai Redemption. Inspector Harry Callahan – Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink (played by Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry film series) Chief Inspector Chen Cao – Qiu Xiaolong; Detective 2nd Grade Stephen Louis ("Steve") Carella – Ed McBain; Detective Sergeant Ray Carling – Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes (played by Dean Andrews) Copyright LibraryThing and/or members of LibraryThing, authors, publishers, libraries, cover designers, Amazon, Bol, Bruna, etc. Now, thanks to Qiu Xiaolong, a poet and translator (as well as a writer of mysteries), a collection of Chen Cao’s poems has become available. But a lot he predicted are realities now, like political propaganda, psychological manipulation, classical conditioning, all these a totalitarian regime uses to keep the people subservient and under control. I have not yet read Brave New World Revisited nor After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Like many concepts in the book world, "series" is a somewhat fluid and contested notion. For instance, the overdramatic turn when Bo slapped Wang Lijun, the Chongqing police chief and Bo’s one-time right-hand man, who, supposedly a secret lover of Bo’s wife, then fled for fear of his life to the American Consulate, carrying criminal evidence against the Bos, particularly that of Bo’s wife murdering a Western businessman.
Or did you only think of working him into a novel later? Also, it was just after the ending of the Cultural Revolution, a period when a number of young people were still somewhat drawn toward the utopia of Marxist idealism. Read more. With the Party’s interest put above everything else—above law—in the one-Party system, he cannot but face the dire politics involved in investigations, staring long and frequently into the abyss (which in turn stares back). All books feature Chief Inspector Chen Cao. As the head of the Special Case Squad, Chen was fortunate enough to find a capable partner and close friend in Detective Yu. Am I right, though, in saying that you make the ties between the Chinese crime solver and Western writer a more central element of this novel than it has been in any earlier one? Here the haunting images of “the unreal city” get juxtaposed with those of the present-day Shanghai, where the system corruption, materialist decadence, sexual dissipation, brazen hypocrisy and spiritual bankruptcy overwhelm the “living dead.” If the ending of the poem still suggest hopes for redemption of humanity through spiritual quest, the ending of the novel is cynical, where Chen quotes a Tang dynasty poem about redemption through contingency of history (like the “Chinese history-changing slap” Bo gave Wang in fury with all the unexpected developments), the only possible hope under the authoritarian one-Party regime. Helpful. You often allude to T.S. 5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite detective.
By default, it sorts by the number, or alphabetically if there is no number. The "Common Knowledge" section now includes a "Series" field.
Here we provide an introduction to the volume penned Qiu, who unquestionably knows Chen and his poetry better than any other person on earth does—or ever could—due to the crucial role he has played in chronicling the versifying sleuth’s cases and writings.
5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite detective. The narration unfolds through a variety of angles, involving the first, second, and third person perspectives, juxtaposing the characters as “no man is an island, entire of itself.” Here you may be reminded of Years of Red Dust, but the new book is different for being more thematically unified. Comment Report abuse. Hence an international scandal too huge for the Beijing authorities to cover up. I allude to him frequently not just because I’ve learned a lot of the modernist techniques while translating his poems in the ‘80s, but also because his impersonal theory enabled me to write in a way different from the romantic tradition, i.e., the poet should not, and cannot, identify himself with the persona or speaker of the poem. It is more experimental, also more rewarding, at least so to myself. These were, just to jog your memory, Brave New World, which I’ve often brought into my commentaries on contemporary China; After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, in which as in your book a memorable visit to a cemetery take place; and the non-fiction work Brave New World Revisited. He is a complex man living in a rapidly changing nation. While doing research for Shanghai Redemption, I was rereading Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, in which I was particularly impressed by a sentence, “The process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like.” For the next book, consequently, it is tentatively titled Becoming Inspector Chen, or Constructing Inspector Chen (perhaps you may tell me which you like better). In the increasingly materialistic society, less and less readers have the time or interests for poetry.
That’s extremely uncommon, suggesting something sinister at the top. Shamima Vawda . Inspector Chen has become one of my favorite characters in a city where I have spent a great deal of time.
To write his detective stories, van Gulick often took an extant Chinese literary text featuring Di Baoan as a starting point. For the next book, consequently, it is tentatively titled Becoming Inspector Chen, or Constructing Inspector Chen (perhaps you may tell me which you like better).
I recently caught up with Qiu by email.
So it’s still a mystery — in a more general sense of the word — about things happening to Chen and others around him in his pre-inspector days. A ready example in Shanghai Redemption is the political movement of singing the red, and I saw with my own eyes an old, feeble worker appearing instantly transformed, radiating with euphoria on TV after mumbling just half a red song. In the next Inspector Chen novel, when he is just state-assigned to the Shanghai Police Bureau, Party Secretary Li gives him a political lecture: “Each of us should be like a screw, fastened contentedly wherever the Party government wants us to, functioning, shining on the State machine.” Seen in a totally positive light, it’s an echo from Diary of Lei Feng, a communist role model advocated by Mao in the ‘60s, and quite recently, by the government under Xi too, but what a night coming true for Huxley’s metaphor about the deprivation of the human individuality by the state like in a factory assembly line.
You’re surely right about his taking “an extant Chinese literary text featuring Di Baoan as a starting point.” In Poets and Murder, for instance, I recognized the poet as none other than the famous Tang dynasty courtesan / poet Yu Xuanji (844?-871?). But another surprising turn intervened. Inspector Chen has become one of my favorite characters in a city where I have spent a great deal of time.
As for the present-day Chinese TV movies featuring Judge Dee, I have watched just an episode. I’m going to, and thank you for reminding me of them. Dean Barrett, another novelist writing about China, recently suggested that I write new Judge Dee books, but with van Gulick before me, how do I dare? In that, Chen also benefits from a tradition in the classical Chinese poetics, in which love poems are read as political allegories through the persona of a unrequited lover. Avoid series that cross authors, unless the authors were or became aware of the series identification (eg., avoid lumping Jane Austen with her continuators). Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of Women. The Party’s new cadre promotion policy came with an unprecedented emphasis on a candidate’s educational credentials, thanks to which Chen was chosen to rise in the ranks. It comes as a terrible blow to his conviction about the relevance of poetry in today’s society.
Less than half of the compositions in the collection appear in the novels, as fragments or whole poems, but even those published there in their entirety have been altered in small or substantial ways here. For the structure, it’s a novel with each chapter of an independent story related to Chen, directly or indirectly, linked in a chronological way, from the traumatic experience in his childhood, to the cases he unwillingly takes when first joining the force. I could have totally forgotten about him but for his failure to return my favorite Double-Happiness racket after a Ping-Pong game there, though that was not something too surprising for the mentality of a “red prince” who would take whatever he liked as rightfully his — with his father being one of the most powerful Communist Party officials in the Forbidden City. That adds a touch of “found poetry” to Chen’s work. All rights reserved. His membership in the Chinese Writers’ Association helped little. Works can belong to more than one series. A repost from the news agency efe-epa. The poems in the present collection are compiled chronologically, to be more specific, in the order of their appearance in the novels in the Inspector Chen series.
In the meantime, he started translating T. S. Eliot and other Western poets, which added to his visibility in the circle. The Inspector Chen series is set in Shanghai in the 1990's at the point when the People's Republic of China is going through major social and economic changes. Some readers may take it for granted that you’ll pen another Inspector Chen novel, but you’ve also done some quite different books lately. As an executive member of the Chinese Writers’ Association, he is often chosen as a Chinese representative to meet with western poets and writers, and on one occasions, to lead the Chinese Writers’ Delegation abroad, an experience chronicled in The Case of Two Cities. Even with occasional publishing still possible here and there, it’s more like decoration than anything else. In the meantime, poetry proves very meaningful for Inspector Chen in an unexpected way. Not like in the early eighties, instead of being fashionable or politically meaningful with the authoritarian government persecution for any independent voice, a poet like Chen becomes marginalized. While fictionalizing, a writer usually intensifies by adding imagined twists and turns into the murderous conspiracy, but those real blood-congealing details in Bo’s case could too easily work into the third-or-fourth rate pulp fiction. I started contemplating a new adventure for Inspector Chen with those questions hovering in the background.
Now when he wrote it, he did not exactly have China in mind.
He was concerned about his possible loss of independence in the event of such a family alliance. Indeed writing Shanghai Redemption repeatedly drew me back into The Waste Land, as the redemption theme runs through both the poem and the novel. Inspired by this process, he also introduces into his own poems a sort of dialogue with the Tang and Song masters, and this interplay between ancient and present-day China and sometimes shows up in snippets of old poems being inserted into his correspondence.
The Missouri-based Qiu, by contrast — a native of and frequent return visitor to Shanghai, where most of his Inspector Chen novels are set — often takes things he has experienced, heard, or read about and reworks them into whodunits.
All rights reserved. Born in 1953 in Shanghai, Qiu dropped out of high school during his junior year and was sent to apprentice in a small garment factory, where he remained for seven years.
Tip: If the series has an order, add a number or other descriptor in parenthesis after the series title (eg., "Chronicles of Prydain (book 1)"). Among his colleagues, he was seen as an unorthodox cop not dedicated to his real job. Did you know you would write a novel linked in some ways to Bo Xilai when he was riding high as head of the massive city of Chongqing or when you first read of his fall? In the dedication page, I quote, “Because I do not hope to turn again” by Guido Cavalcanti, a line which Eliot also quoted and used.
For instance, “untitled poems” by Li Shangyin, one of Chen’s favorite Tang dynasty poets, are often interpreted like that, the way John Donne’s love poems are read for the metaphysical significance. Now, thanks to Qiu Xiaolong, a poet and translator (as well as a writer of mysteries), a collection of Chen Cao’s poems has become available . With Bian’s encouragement, Chen had them published in Poetry and other magazines.
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