Product Description

The Strange Tales of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are exquisite and amusing miniatures that are regarded as the pinnacle of classical Chinese fiction. With their elegant prose, witty wordplay and subtle charm, the 104 stories in this selection reveal a world in which nothing is as it seems. Here a Taoist monk conjures up a magical pear tree, a scholar recounts his previous incarnations, a woman out-foxes the fox-spirit that possesses her, a child bride gives birth to a thimble-sized baby, a ghostly city appears out of nowhere and a heartless daughter-in-law is turned into a pig. In his tales of humans coupling with shape-shifting spirits, bizarre phenomena, haunted buildings and enchanted objects, Pu Songling pushes back the boundaries of human experience and enlightens as he entertains.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #162674 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-25
• Original language: Mandarin Chinese
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

About the Author
PU SONGLING (1645-1715) was a poor, undistinguished scholar who had an uneventful life. He took the lowest degree, the bachelor's, before he was twenty, but ten years later, he still had not succeeded in passing the second, the master's degree, due to his neglect of the standard fields of academic study. His loss of personal status is the world's gain, however, because his overriding interest was in tales of the supernatural, and his collected works, the bible of Chinese supernatural folktales.

Customer Reviews

Strange Tales!
This is a collection to dip in to again and again. The "Strange Tales" vary from tales of "fox spirits" and the supernatural, to reports of strange natural phenomena and simply amusing tales of the "a friend of a friend" type. The stories range in size from a single paragraph to extended short stories, and the thematic range is wide. I found reading tale after tale far less effective than dipping in according to the time available - a short page-long tale over a cup of coffee gets you back to work with a spring in your step, while a single longer short story can fill a pleasant early evening.

Fox spirits appear again and again, and the introduction is useful in giving a sense of their position in Chinese culture - not ghosts in the European sense - and it is worth reading through the introduction either before reading the tales themselves, or dipping into it as you go. But the tales are such fun and so well told that you don't need an in-depth (or even basic) knowledge of seventeenth-century Chinese culture to enjoy them.

This volume of tales is only a selection from Pu Songling's whole work, and it left me pining for more.

Pick'n'mix of the unexpected
The previous reviewer is right to say that this is something you pick up and come back to. It's a collection of (sometimes very) short stories, mostly about fox spirits and ghosts.
The introduction tells us that contemporary reviewers recommend that you don't read the stories for the plot, but for their style. Given that this is a translation, this suggests that there's little value in reading the stories at all! There are definitely some which spring a surprise on you and others that are interesting historically, such as the description of the Indian Rope Trick, but all in all I found this pretty disappointing.
Fans of the uncanny may find this more appealing, however.