A deep exploration of a Chinese household of means - its adults, children, servants, relatives. Dream of the Red Chamber beguiles you with its strongly written characters, who are almost always one step ahead of the reader. The subtlety of their dialogue and decisions reveal an intricate world - lived-in, failing, and suddenly lost.

This is an abridged translation, and while the translator did a good job, I don’t think it allows one to have fully read Dream of the Red Chamber nor understand the work’s associated cultural and literary significance.

It’s hard to write about such an important book. Whenever I approach a novel like this, that is such an important book for world literature, I find myself with conflicting emotions of having to like it and find its grandeur, while at the same time find myself bored and not engaging with the story being told.
I didn’t find myself so much bored, as lost at some conventionalism I feel I should have known.
I should say that even when reading modern books, I find stories about rich people’s problems far from my interest. So approaching this story which seems to deal mostly with an affluent family and its trouble. The young trio of characters seem to be in an imposible love story, that also doesn’t manage to catch my attention.
Maybe it was not the best choice for diving into Chinese literature.

Loved it, but wish I'd known this was only the first 56 chapters (of 120)- and it turns out that you can't get more than those chapters without turning to multi-volume hard-copy editions. Thanks to amazon, I should get to read the rest soon, though.

This book is a work of literature in its time - described in carefully crafted narratives with symbolic poetry to show a tragic tale of demise of four rich families, but also a brave critique of the corrupted society of upper classes around that time. While I needed literary and character analyzes to help decipher the rich poetry and symbolism in this book, it was a wonderful read.

Interesting look into the lives of mid 18th century Chinese Elites. I feel like something is lost in translation however.

Merged review:

Interesting look into the lives of mid 18th century Chinese Elites. I feel like something is lost in translation however.

This is quite a long book, and the quality of writing is not equal along the book. Most of the text is the depiction of the life of a big wealthy family in early modern China. Initial plot line furcate multiple time, adding multiple characters with their tragedies and exploits, which makes it difficult to follow the story, and from the chapter 10 or so my main motivation to keep up reading was ethnological. That does not mean it has no brilliant places: particularly poetry is amazing, poetic description and also witty jokes.

Another peculiarity of the book is that though the author had a clear the programme for his work, he was not able to finish it. It was finished by the editors and the final third of the book is quite different from the rest of the book, and it does not make it better.

The author has deep philosophical and religious motivation, which drives the plot, and I could not describe or rightly identify all the concepts he had in mind. But from my point of view, the tragedies which devastate the family and almost every personage in the book are caused by the principle 'Everybody lies', which they made their main modus operandi.