Letters Back to Ancient China Book

Ever since my early teenagerhood, I have enjoyed (and often at times also rather focussed on) time travel and time slip novels. But conversely, because I have indeed and therefore read quite a substantial amount of this particular literary genre over the decades of my life, any time travel or time slip stories that I do end up considering and reading nowadays will obviously and naturally also have to be both pretty well fresh and with novel ideas and philosophies presented for me to be both enthralled by and filled with unrestrained reading pleasure.

And sadly, while Herbert Rosendorfer's 1983 Briefe in die chinesische Vergangenheit (the English title of which is Letters Back to Ancient China) does indeed start out promisingly enough, with a 10th century Chinese mandarin travelling from ancient China to 1980s Munich (and sending back multiple letters in which he describes his perceptions of both the latter 20th century in general and then still West Germany in particular), I do have to admit that with Briefe in die chinesische Vergangenheit, I also and equally rather quickly became more than a trifle bored and frustrated.

For albeit that the mandarin's observations about and regarding the oh so problematically fast-paced tendencies of modern life, about our (German and otherwise) rampant materialism are both interesting and naturally and obviously also with a considerable amount of truth to them, the mandarin's observations are equally something that is at the same time so very much a textual standard in contemporary time travel fiction and in particular in those novels where old and new, where ancient and modern are compared and contrasted, that really Briefe in die chinesische Vergangenheit has not really (in my opinion) shown and demonstrated anything all that truly unique, that Herbert Rosendorfer's story feels at best rather majorly derivative and as such also quite if not even totally frustratingly mundane, certainly not a bad story in and of itself, but also with no content, with no themes that manage to stand out in any manner and to make me personally consider more than a two star maximum for Briefe in die chinesische Vergangenheit.

And no, I am thus and of course also not likely ever going to be considering the sequel either, as I truly do majorly doubt that Die große Umwendung: Neue Briefe in die chinesische Vergangenheit would be to my reading tastes, I seriously doubt that I would enjoy Herbert Rosendorfer's writing any more than my distinctly lacklustre reaction to Briefe in die chinesische Vergangenheit has indicated.