Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a decoded record of the famous deceased Chinese lietraturer Cao Xue-Qin, who was best known as the author of Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Red Chamber is believed to be semi-autobiographical, mirroring the rise and decline of author Cao Xueqin's own family and, by extension, of the Qing Dynasty. In the opening chapter of the novel, a couplet is introduced: Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true; Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real. It is a major challenge to translate Cao's prose, which utilizes many levels of colloquial and literary language and incorporates forms of classic poetry that are integral to the work, passing the ethics of Chinese Literature for generations.
