Word: lins
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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MOMENT IN PEKING-Lin Yutang-John...
...Nazarene" is a fine and compelling account of the life of Christ, occasionally marred by the somewhat unnecessary framework. . . . As for Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," we are silent and abashed. Let him who can think of a better category for this experiment in language classify it for himself. . . Lin Yutang's "Moment in Peking" offers a glimpse into the world of a Chinese whose views on himself, life and the Occident have gained him a wide following. Don't take your preconceptions about the novel form with you into this novel. . . There's always John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath...
Moment in Peking, Lin Yutang's first novel, is modeled exactly on traditional Chinese novels. Almost 100 characters crowd its 815 close-print pages; it is written with almost Basic English simplicity. Crammed with incident, but plotless, Moment in Peking chronicles the history of three wealthy middle-class Chinese families, from the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when its heroine, ten-year-old Mulan, is kidnapped by soldiers, to New Year's, 1938, when she joins the epic flight of 40,000,000 high-spirited refugees into China's vast interior...
Moment in Peking is by no means such a jumble as suggested by its cast of characters-not only three generations of three prolific families, together with in-laws, but concubines, servants, friends and enemies as well. What makes Author Lin's "little talk" coherent is the central position of the Yao family. Through their connections with the Tseng and New families, with honest and corrupt officials, big business, scholars, intellectuals, black sheep, third-generation revolutionists, ruined Mandarins, singsong girls, peasants, the Yao family get an extraordinarily diverse view of the revolutionary history of their time...
...last 76 pages, covering the Sino-Japanese war, hardly do more than scratch the surface of the contemporary Chinese scene. But Moment in Peking, far superior to Author Lin's whimsical The Importance of Living, may well become the classic background novel of modern China...