Monkey King: Journey to the West

Written by Wu Cheng'en, Julia Lovell and Gene Luen Yang

Narrated by Robert Wu

A Chinese Lord of the Rings and one of the all-time great fantasy novels--which Neil Gaiman has said "is in the DNA of 1.5 billion people"--now in a thrilling new translation

A shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life, Monkey King is one of the most memorable superheroes in world literature. High-spirited and omni-talented, he amasses dazzling weapons and skills on his journey to immortality: a gold-hooped staff that can grow as tall as the sky and shrink to the size of a needle; the ability to travel 108,000 miles in a single somersault. A master of subterfuge, he can transform himself into whomever or whatever he chooses and turn each of his body's 84,000 hairs into an army of clones. But his penchant for mischief repeatedly gets him into trouble, and when he raids Heaven's Orchard of Immortal Peaches and gorges himself on the elixirs of the gods, the Buddha pins him beneath a mountain, freeing him only five hundred years later for a chance to redeem himself: He is to protect the pious monk Tripitaka on his fourteen-year journey to India in search of precious Buddhist sutras that will bring enlightenment to the Chinese empire.

Joined by two other fallen immortals--Pigsy, a rice-loving pig able to fly with its ears, and Sandy, a depressive man-eating river-sand monster--Monkey King undergoes eighty-one trials, doing battle with Red Boy, Princess Jade-Face, the Monstress Dowager, and all manner of dragons, ogres, wizards, and femmes fatales, navigating the perils of Fire-Cloud Cave, the River of Flowing Sand, the Water-Crystal Palace, and Casserole Mountain, and being serially captured, lacquered, sautéed, steamed, and liquefied, but always hatching an ingenious plan to get himself and his fellow pilgrims out of their latest jam.

Monkey King: Journey to the West is at once a rollicking adventure, a comic satire of Chinese bureaucracy, and a spring of spiritual insight. With this new translation, the irrepressible rogue hero of one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature has the potential to vault, with his signature cloud-somersault and unerring sense for fun, into the hearts of millions of Americans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Translator: Julia Lovell
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780593393383

Wu Cheng'en

Wu Cheng'en (ca. 1500-1582) was een Chinese schrijver, dichter en ambtenaar uit de Ming-dynastie, geboren in Huai'an, provincie Jiangsu. Hij was bekend om zijn scherpe humor, humanistische blik en diepgaande kennis van het boeddhisme, taoïsme en confucianisme. Wu studeerde aan de Nanking Rijksacademie en diende later als ambtenaar, maar wijdde zich vooral aan literatuur en satire. Zijn naam leeft voort als auteur van Reis naar het Westen (Xiyouji), een van de vier klassieke romans van de Chinese literatuur, waarin volksverhalen, religieuze allegorie en levendige verbeeldingskracht samenkomen.

Reviews for Monkey King

[kakadoo202 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Main character is just too annoying for me to finish this.

[murphy4jacobs · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Huge fun, especially for assigned reading for a college class. The translation is very accessible, there's plenty of humor, and the introduction gives a lot of very interesting information about this influential tale.

[lucky2loki · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For what I'd expect from a 500 year old novel, "Journey to the West" is impressively irreverent and inventive. A lot of this is probably thanks to Julia Lovell's translation, which does a remarkable job of bringing dialogue and characters to life in what could easily become a dreary parade of anonymous divinities and overwrought action sequences. It spends nearly a third of its pages on the origins of its protagonist Monkey, and a couple of chapters on the familial origins of the human monk who fills the role of the traditional (if amusingly whiny) hero, and then the rest on the titular journey -- itself a surprising structure. I would have foolishly assumed the story to be nearly the entire book, but not so.

The events themselves are very fairy tale-like, where a problem is presented and then (usually) quickly solved by Monkey's magical feats and trickery. When on occasion Monkey falls short, they simply have to complain to their Bodhisattva protector Guanyin, and she will unfailingly deux ex machina their way out of it. Thus, the book has very little in the way of actual stakes, and that I suspect remains its primary problem to most modern readers. But there is a lot of humour (primarily either cheeky Monkey dialogue or revelling in how bureaucratic the divine world is seen to be), some surprising turns on occasion, and even some characte development, so overall, it is a smaller issue than I would have assumed up front.

If you have an interest in this sort of thing -- by which I mean mythological novels from the 1500s -- you could do a lot worse than reading "Monkey King". Particularly, I imagine. in this particular translation.