Product Details
The Monkey and the Monk: An Abridgment of "The Journey to the West"

The Monkey and the Monk: An Abridgment of "The Journey to the West"
By AC Yu

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Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #755667 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-11-10
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 528 pages

Customer Reviews

Wonderful quickly turning into tedious!3
This is the abridged version of the 2000 page Chinese classic 'Journey to The West'. A monk is sent to the west (here meaning Tibet/India sort of region) to get some holy scripts. In this he is joined by monkey et al. The book is wonderful as it offers fantastic metaphysical battle scenes and a glimpse into Chinese mythlogy (Chinese visions of the afterlife are especially interesting as they're so different to the Abrahamic tradition). Anyway, speaking for myself, anything with a talking kung fu fighting monkey is interesting!

HOWEVER, despite being an abridgment, it is still unecessarily long. The first 100-200 pages will keep you interested but after that it is just more of the same. As they travel to the west the Monk and his fellow travellers have to go through many ordeals and tests but they are very repetitive as most fairy tales are. This is why the book starts out wonderful but turns quite tedious shortly before midway.

Btw. For those of you that don't know, this is the story that tv show 'Monkey Magic' is based on.