A review by zunia
Kobiety w kąpieli by Tie Ning
2.0
I want to mention the Polish translation done by Anna Gralak. Although the book wasn’t translated directly from Chinese, but English, which I normally don’t support, the translation was brilliant and I believe it was what made the book enjoyable to read.
The story itself, however, was really upsetting. It talks about trauma cycles and self sabotage. Even though it was meant to be about women, we can tell the characters’ entire lives are mostly ruled by men. The book wasn’t so much about “women”, but rather the characters’ extreme emotions. If we take Fan for example, her behavior was so childish that a lot of the dialogues between her and Tiao were just ridiculous.
There are quite a few graphic sex scenes. At first I didn’t mind, but once we got to Tiao and Chen Zai being together, the descriptions got so “poetic” that I couldn’t help but cringe.
The Cultural Revolution is present, but it only seems to be the core of the older generation’s (namely, Wu and Yixun’s) problems. Tie Ning — as an author promoted by the Communist Party — criticized the Revolution, but also used it to emphasize the “positive change” in the 80s/90s (“more Western products on the market, lots of new restaurants opening, students get opportunities abroad”)…
The differences between “the West” aka the US and “the East” aka China shown in the book were extremely superficial so I won’t get into detail.
When it comes to the ending, I’ve seen a lot of frustrated reviews which I personally don’t really get. The story was frustrating for me as well but I didn’t really see any happy future for Tiao and Chen Zai anyway. What I disliked about the ending, however, was when the narrator compared Wu and Meicheng to each other, saying they’re both “women who tried to live up to men’s expectations”. Yes, except one of them is a cheater and a bad parent living in guilt and the other is a victim that can’t seem to move on from a relationship that was a mistake.
Overall, the book wasn’t bad but it’s not a must-read. I expected way more having seen Oe Kenzaburo’s positive review.
The story itself, however, was really upsetting. It talks about trauma cycles and self sabotage. Even though it was meant to be about women, we can tell the characters’ entire lives are mostly ruled by men. The book wasn’t so much about “women”, but rather the characters’ extreme emotions. If we take Fan for example, her behavior was so childish that a lot of the dialogues between her and Tiao were just ridiculous.
There are quite a few graphic sex scenes. At first I didn’t mind, but once we got to Tiao and Chen Zai being together, the descriptions got so “poetic” that I couldn’t help but cringe.
The Cultural Revolution is present, but it only seems to be the core of the older generation’s (namely, Wu and Yixun’s) problems. Tie Ning — as an author promoted by the Communist Party — criticized the Revolution, but also used it to emphasize the “positive change” in the 80s/90s (“more Western products on the market, lots of new restaurants opening, students get opportunities abroad”)…
The differences between “the West” aka the US and “the East” aka China shown in the book were extremely superficial so I won’t get into detail.
When it comes to the ending, I’ve seen a lot of frustrated reviews which I personally don’t really get. The story was frustrating for me as well but I didn’t really see any happy future for Tiao and Chen Zai anyway. What I disliked about the ending, however, was when the narrator compared Wu and Meicheng to each other, saying they’re both “women who tried to live up to men’s expectations”. Yes, except one of them is a cheater and a bad parent living in guilt and the other is a victim that can’t seem to move on from a relationship that was a mistake.
Overall, the book wasn’t bad but it’s not a must-read. I expected way more having seen Oe Kenzaburo’s positive review.