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    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures
    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures
    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures
    Ebook135 pages1 hour

    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures

    By G. (Georges) Soulié de Morant and Pu Songling

    4.5/5

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    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1969
    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures

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    Reviews for Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Pu Songling (1640 - 1715) collected these tales of the supernatural and uncanny and left them to his sons in the form of 110 handwritten, loose-leaf sheets. They have since been published many times, with additions and deletions, and been drawn upon by other authors (and playwrights, and television script-writers) for plots and plot elements. This edition uses Herbert Giles' translation of the late 1800s, complete with his extensive footnotes offering commentary, but updates spellings to reflect the currently-favored Pinyin system. Giles' notes are themselves an artifact now, half illuminating, half hopelessly chauvinist. The tales are wonderful, involving fox people, dreams, trips back and forth to the afterlife/underworld, just deserts, rewards for long-suffering love or virtue, and inexplicable tragedies. These are not ghost stories in a western, gothic sense; just tales of the fantastic, with the implicit promise that, for better or worse, bizarre events may unfold anywhere, at any time. Most of the stories are not long, but altogether, the collection is dense, and reading a few at a time, it took me over a year to work my way through. What the collection reveals about Chinese culture, I have no idea; but a Chinese American acquaintance, on seeing me reading the book and hearing my description of it, told me that fox people in particular are still widely believed to exist, and to be a source of great potential mischief (although in more of these stories, they are instead a source of welcome assistance and friendship, at least when treated kindly), much like faeries or gnomes in some parts of Europe.
    • 4/5
      Pu Songling (1640 - 1715) collected folk tales and published 491 of them under the title Strange Tales of Liaozhai (aka Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio). This book contains 50 tales of human contact with supernatural creatures, including gods, ghosts, fox fairies, flower nymphs, crocodile princesses and bee spirits. There are stories about the iniquity of the feudal system, others about the corruption involved in the imperial examination system, and lots of love stories. Unfortunately it's a rather clumsy translation, but the stories are still fascinating and there are some good illustrations, with my favourite being the picture of the fox fairy facing page 50.I thought the introduction was rather strange until I realised that although this book was printed in Hong Kong, the translators were all academics working at universities in the People's Republic of China, hence the apologetic tone and insistence that although Pu Songling was from a landowning family, he had great sympathy for the hardship suffered by the peasants.
    • 4/5
      The book contains a collection of a little over 100 tales from Pu Songling's original 500 , which is rather unfortunate, as I would love to read all of them. I was hooked from the very first tale and took every opportunity to read more. Granted, some tales are mere curiosities that I don't find particularly appealing (for example, an account of a man with a dozen frogs that were trained to croak on cue and in "perfect pitch"), but most were enthralling. The tales have a broad range of subjects, although most were dealing with either fox-spirits or ghost, yet every one was different and unique.The translator's preface was good as well and helped to put things in the proper perspective. The notes and a glossary at the back also are great for those, like myself, not familiar with the broader Chinese literature. The only complaint I have -- and even that is more my fault than the editor's -- is that I didn't realize there were notes until I was practically done with the book. It would have been helpful to have footnote-style annotation in the text of the tales to give some indication that this particular line/word is explained in the notes. As things stand, if you run across something that you don't understand, you just have to flip to the back and hope there is a note about it. That said, the notes are thorough and provide a lot of added content.

    Book preview

    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures - G. (Georges) Soulié de Morant

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