Transmigration littéraire: la Chine éternelle dans le miroir de l'Occident (Literary Transmigration: Eternal China in the Mirror of the West)
A roundtable with Shan Sa
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
236 Royce Hall
UCLA
Shan Sa
Author of La Joueuse de Go (The Girl Who Played Go),
translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Knopf, 2003
Discussion led by Professors Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih
This multilingual event will be in French, Chinese, and English
"Born in Beijing, [Shan Sa] started writing at seven and enjoyed success as a teenage poet. At 18 she moved to Paris to study, worked for the artist Balthus and won a Goncourt with her first novel (she writes in French), a Prix Cazes for her second and another Goncourt for La Joueuse de go, her third novel, which is also being filmed. At a time when Chinese women's fiction in translation tends to be autobiographical, it is a relief to discover The Girl Who Played Go. Shan Sa's first book to be translated into English shows her to be more interested in narrative form and history than in self-exploration." (The Guardian, May 24, 2003)
"In her first novel to appear in English (her two previous novels, published in French, won the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Cazes), Sa masterfully evokes strife-ridden Manchuria during the 1930s. The first-person narration deftly alternates between a 16-year-old Chinese girl and a Japanese soldier from the invading force. As in the Chinese game of go, the two main characters-the girl discovering desire, the soldier visiting prostitutes, both in a besieged city-will ultimately cross paths, with surprising consequences for both. Sa's prose shifts between lavish metaphor-the girl's sister, grieved by an adulterous husband, is "not a woman but a flower slowly wilting"-and matter-of-fact concision ("We weary of the game and kill them," the soldier says of two Chinese prisoners, "two bullets in the head"). The most absorbing subplot is Sa's careful rendering of the girl's sexual awakening. Though at first intrigued by a liaison with a revolution -minded student, she is reluctant to enter adulthood, a state she views as fraught with injury and falsehood, "a sad place full of vanity." To escape her increasingly troubled life, she becomes a master at go, eventually taking on the soldier, who is in disguise. As the two meet to play, they gradually become entranced, even while war rages around them. The alternating parallel tales add an extra spark of energy to this swift-moving novel, as Sa portrays tenderness and brutality with equal clarity" (Publishers Weekly, Oct. 16, 2003)
A list of the reviews of Shan Sa's book The Girl Who Played Go
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/china/shansa.htm
and an interesting article by Sarah Smith
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,961314,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4674724-110738,00.html
For more information please contact
Richard Gunde
Tel: 310 825-8683
gunde@ucla.edu
Sponsor(s): Asian Languages and Cultures, French and Francophone Studies
