A Private Life

By Chen Ran

Book Overview

From one of China's most celebrated contemporary novelists comes this riveting tale of a young woman's emotional and sexual awakening. Set in the turbulent decades of the Cultural Revolution and the Tian'anmen Square incident, A Private Life exposes the complex and fantastical inner life of a young woman growing up during a time of intense social and political upheaval.

At the age of twenty-six, Ni Niuniu has come to accept pain and loss. She has suffered the death of her mother and a close friend and neighbor, Mrs. Ho. She has long been estranged from her tyrannical father, while her boyfriend--a brilliant and handsome poet named Yin Nan--was forced to flee the country. She has survived a disturbing affair with a former teacher, a mental breakdown that left her in a mental institution for two years, and a stray bullet that tore through the flesh of her left leg. Now living in complete seclusion, Niuniu shuns a world that seems incapable of accepting her and instead spends her days wandering in vivid, dreamlike reveries where her fractured recollections and wild fantasies merge with her inescapable feelings of melancholy and loneliness. Yet this eccentric young woman--caught between the disappearing traditions of the past and a modernizing Beijing, a flood of memories and an unknowable future, her chosen solitude and her irrepressible longing--discovers strength and independence through writing, which transforms her flight from the hypocrisy of urban life into a journey of self-realization and rebirth.

First published in 1996 to widespread critical acclaim, Chen Ran's controversial debut novel is a lyrical meditation on memory, sexuality, femininity, and the often arbitrary distinctions between madness and sanity, alienation and belonging, nature and society. As Chen leads the reader deep into the psyche of Ni Niuniu--into her innermost secrets and sexual desires--the borders separating narrator and protagonist, writer and subject dissolve, exposing the shared aspects of human existence that transcend geographical and cultural differences.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231131968
• ISBN13: 9780231131964
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.3"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A Powerful Feminist Voice from China

Chen Ran's A PRIVATE LIFE is a small and quiet novel that I simply could not put down, offering up a powerful and beautifully written examination of universal themes: the attainment of womanhood, women's social and sexual roles, their relationships with one another, and the psychological traumas often inflicted upon them by the men in their lives (fathers, teachers, boyfriends, lovers). This book is simultaneously a coming of age story and a deeply moving exploration of a solitary and tortured soul unable (or unwilling) to cope with the world presented to her. A PRIVATE LIFE traces the main character, Ni Niuniu, from age eleven to adulthood. Born in 1968, Niuniu traces the arc of her life against the evolving state of women's consciousness in China during the last thirty years of the century. Told entirely in the first person, the narrator provides us a deeply introspective, almost surreal view of her maturation as a sexual being and her difficulties coping with her feelings in a sexually repressed society. Chen Ran's approach is at times humorous, at times sensual, and at times dark to the point of paranoia. She has limned a character who increasingly shuts herself off from the world around her until there is little left but her bathtub, which she has converted into her bed, and a fantasy world she has constructed to shelter herself from the harsh realities beyond her door. Chen Ran's short novel is sad without being maudlin, sensual without being sexual, and horrifying without being melodramatic. She has drawn a character whom we feel compelled to reach out to, to care for, and yet we know that she is beyond help as we watch her personal world evaporate and her mental world deteriorate. The prose is rich in imagery, sharp and evocative from the very first page: "As if being devoured by a huge, pitiless rat, time withers away moment by moment and is lost....Only death, the tombstone over our graves, can stop it." A PRIVATE LIFE is a truly literary work, easily readable and profoundly moving. It is perhaps the most un-Chinese of the many Chinese novels I have read, reaching a universal plane that frees it from time and place. Sadly, Chen Ran will not likely be widely read in the United States; it is our loss. A PRIVATE LIFE deserves a very large public audience which I fear it will never attain. If you read this review, I urge you to read Chen Ran's wonderful novel; you will not be disappointed.