A best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privilege, bad romance, and political intrigue during World War II in China. Now available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang’s dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart.
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My second Eileen Chang, after [b:Half a Lifelong Romance 25937741 Half a Lifelong Romance Eileen Chang https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1456693593l/25937741.SY75.jpg 2929435]. We follow Julie through her time as a student in Hong Kong during the Japanese invasion, and her family- and relationship entanglements in Shanghai after WWII. She, her mother and her aunt are very untraditional, travel and have multiple relationships. They exist on the cusp between the oriental past and the modern age. Julie's mother's feet are bound, her father is an opium addict, yet Julie earns her money writing novels that get adapted as movies. They yearn for love, but also value their freedom. Chang has such an interesting writing style. It's segmented, jumps in time, without giving you so much as a paragraph break as a warning. She doesn't take you by the hand while she utilises a vast and complicately-linked cast of characters, and often leaves you guessing about what happens between the lines. Her characters have relationships and affairs, and mostly sexual encounters are elegantly and vaguely hinted at, and yet sometimes her descriptions are quite explicit. And add to all that ocassional beautiful sentences that have such an evocative and piercing quality.It was like coming home after watching a sentimental movie, the same feeling of strangeness that she felt when returning to her childhood home: everything became smaller, shorter, and older. She experienced a sense of rapture. It all adds up to a very intriguing mix, that's not easy to fall into or follow along with, but still has this unique exquisite style. I prefer [b:Half a Lifelong Romance 25937741 Half a Lifelong Romance Eileen Chang https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1456693593l/25937741.SY75.jpg 2929435] over this one, as it had a more streamlined plot, but i think Little Reunions still will stay with me. 3.5
