Reviews for Story of the Stone (aka Dream of the Red Chamber), Volume 3: The Warning Voice

The average rating for Story of the Stone (aka Dream of the Red Chamber), Volume 3: The Warning Voice based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-06 00:00:00 Andrij Usztan Quite a change from the last two volumes. In many ways it feels like it comes off the rails, as more and more time gets spent on digressions and the love triangle that's ostensibly at the heart of the plot fades to nothingness. The poetry also all but disappears and gets replaced by high melodrama and a creeping sense of doom. "The beast with a thousand legs is a long time dying," but by Chapter 80 everyone in the household can see the end. It might seem like so many changes to something already perfect would cause the quality to drop, but the growing sense of emptiness and decay produces some of the most beautiful moments of the entire novel so far: the lonely Mid-Autumn Festival, Bao-yu's elegy for Skybright, the flower cards, and of course the long, long saga of Er-jie and San-jie which explodes into the quiet lives of the Jias to reveal just how bad things have been allowed to get. Almost no one makes it out of this book unaltered except, maybe, Dai-yu, but as the last few chapters make clear her fate as well is closing in on her. Despite minor continuity errors and some strange pacing, the writing in this volume is some of Cao Xueqin's finest. If the lost 40 chapters had never been "found," I would say that what we have by the end of the volume would both be enough to make most of the rest of the plot clear, and to confirm The Story of the Stone as an awe-inspiring, life-changing work of art.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-02 00:00:00 Bob Boberson After greatly enjoying Volume 2, I found this long middle volume a bit of a slog. I can't tell how much of this is due to any intrinsic difference (after all, the 5-volume division was made by the translator, not the author) and how much of it is due to the fact that I have a finite, if large, patience for this kind of story. In my review of Vol. 2 I made a big deal out of how formless the plot is -- sometimes dramatic, sometimes very mundane for long stretches, never following predictable "arc" structures -- and how this struck me as enjoyably lifelike. Vol. 3 is, if anything, more extreme in this regard. In particular, it focuses more than the earlier volumes on a wide array of "minor" characters, to the point that the putative main characters disappear for long stretches. There is a thin line between the sublime "lifelikeness" I praised in Vol. 2 and just being really really boring, and a lot of Vol. 3 crossed that line for me. That said, there is a stretch near the middle of the book -- the story of the You sisters -- that is atypically exciting and dramatic, and I found myself racing through it. This section ends with the appearance of a character, "the lame Taoist," who had originally appeared way back in Vol. 1 when the story involved more supernatural elements, and the translator comments that in fact this entire section might have been spliced in from another more dramatic, more supernatural novel which Xueqin never finished or showed to the world. I found this quite disappointing; it made me feel as though I had been reading something haphazardly made, which expressed no unified artistic vision but instead just consisted of a bunch of disparate pieces slapped together. This feeling is of course only worsened by the fact that Xueqin himself did not finish the novel -- the sections definitely written by him end with Vol. 3, and Vols. 4-5 are thought to be written at least in part by someone else. What is this thing I have been reading for several years now? It has been called the greatest work of Chinese literature. Mao Zedong claimed to have read it 25 times and recommended that others read it 5 times (it is 2500 pages long!). It has beautiful and hilarious moments, incredibly dull stretches, a strange and problematic structure and textual history. It definitely doesn't have fit the model I have in mind for a "great work." But I am determined to see it through to the end, in part because I have no idea where it could possibly be going. On to Vol. 4.