Book Review: "Half a Lifelong Romance" by Eileen Chang

Eileen Chang's novels are somewhat always tinged with something of sadness and tragedy that is very real and this is rejection. The rejection of the love story between two people by other characters just feels so real and feels so intense that you do feel like you are partaking in this one, single moment. Throughout the rest of the book, these two people try to get back to each other almost "Romeo and Juliet" style. There is also something deeply intimate about the way in which the descriptions are written. When I say this, I mean the way the atmospheres are described to us, the way in which the characters seem to move almost either in real time, or much slower. When these two people are apart, time moves slower, when the rejection happens, time seems almost painfully slow and things happen in concordance to how the atmosphere depicts them. If they are most intense, the passage of time slows down to the point of it almost stopping at this absolutely terrifying, intimate and painful moment.

Now we're going to have a look at some quotations that I thought were really pretty cool. As you know, I love Eileen Chang's control of pace and tone - so many of the quotations will be based around that particular aspect.

"She had a round face that seemed squarish inside the roundness - not four-cornered, but distinct, well defined. Her had was ruffled and loose, falling over her shoulders in a casual style. Shijun wasn't in the habit of assessing a girl on some sort of beauty scale; he simply liked the way she looked. She thrust her hands into her coat pockets and smiled. The two young men pulled out a bench, only to find that the red-painted seat was black with grime. Shijun sisn't care, he was grimy too, from working on machinery. But Shuhui, trim and tidy in a business suit, gave it a sharp look before sitting down..."

I love this quotation. All that happens is she arrives and then they look at each other and sit down on a bench. However, there is some sort of intensity just radiating from the way in which Eileen Chang just slows down the pace all the way until we see the thought processes of the people involved.

"The sun has no strength that day; the sky had darkened before they could finish the first roll of film. They hurried back, but still got caught by streaks of springtime snow dissolving into the cold rain. When they passed a little shop, Manzhen saw oil-paper umbrellas hanging inside and wanted one. Trying them out, she discovered that some were solid, blue or green, and others had a pattern.She looked at one that had a swirl of purple graped and another in a solid colour and couldn't make up her mind. Shuhui said women were always like that, when they went shopping. Shijun smiled and said that he thought the plainer one was better. She bought it right away..."

This quotation is beautiful because the only real action that happens is about the umbrella. It shows the control of pace that the author has, in the best possible way.

"It continued raining they'd returned from the edge to town to the factory. At five o'clock, when they left work, the sky was already darkening. But a vague urge arose in Shijun, and sent him back to the city's outskirts through the rain. The muddy banks of the rice paddies were treacherous ; his feet slipped as he made his way along the dykes. There was a little tiled tomb, the size of a kennel, lying low on the edge of a field. They hadn't noticed it in the daytime; seeing it now in the dusky rain gave him an eerie feeling. It was perfectly quiet all around, except for the wailing bark of a dog. He passed no one and saw only one other person across the canal, carrying a lantern and a big apricot-orange umbrella..."

I love this passage because, as in the rest of the book, these slow passages of loneliness come to converge on a larger picture of 'with and without'. This person being alone makes time pass slower and even though they are walking across different scenes, the rain and the atmosphere make everything just slow down to almost existential levels.

All in all, the representation of this crisis through the reflection off the atmosphere is a gorgeous feature of Eileen Chang's writing and can confirm that I will be reading her in the future.