Dreams of Red Mansions

Xueqin Cao

This book is so horrible it would ruin the state of the blog to put any piece of it up.

While Dreams of Red Mansions may be a timeless Chinese classic, there must have been quite a bit that got mauled in the translation. Truly, I should have guessed as much when my translation was begun with quotations from Chairman Mao (in bold print no less). But the folly of this work is much deeper than the choice of preface.
Not only would I liken it to a cheap American soap opera, but I would even go so far as to say those steady fans of soap operas would gag on this one. But I don't blame anyone for the wasted hours of my life which this book has so greedily consumed; I brought it upon my own foolish self. People gave me adequate hints all along the way (i.e. a book about incest). Unfortunately these hints were so colorful in nature I assumed them all to be jokes. They were not.
Dreams of Red Mansions tells the story of a family (extended beyond all realistic connections to include a huge group of people with three or four different surnames) and its twisted inter-relations. The only high points of the book were the chapters narrated by a rock. These actually were witty and since one of them began the whole travesty, tricked me into reading on. The names of places and spirits are also quite entertaining, but one can only take so much of the Garden of Liquid Inimitable Purity and the Jade of Abstract Spiritual Confusion. These are only a few samples of the simpler sort, the real things were often much more convoluted. One name actually consumed an entire paragraph much to the chagrin of the plot. So the point is: unless you plan on reading it in the original Chinese, don't come anywhere near this atrocity. 2/10