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From Monsters and Critics.com Books News Well, I can’t say that for sure, but judging by the title, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, it is a good guess. The author, Wang Anyi, tells the story of Shanghai and is what the NYT describes as, “These observations could stand as an epigraph for this beautiful novel, which considers, among its many themes, the question of what endures and what remains the same — what resists the passage of time and what succumbs to the forces of cataclysmic social change.” Translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan, Publishers Weekly notes, “In a beautifully constructed cyclical narrative from Wang Anyi (Baotown), fashion serves as the lens through which Wang Qiyao analyzes her descent from fleeting fame to desperate anonymity. Charting her fortunes becomes a metaphor for a vanished way of Shanghai life in this ingenious tale: friends and lovers come and go, Maoist China undergoes immense social and political changes (none explicitly detailed), yet Wang Qiyao finds that [t]here are only so many designs, and their rotation is what defines fashion. Only sometimes a cycle drags on too long. As the novel builds to its tragic conclusion, the manner in which character types and events recur against the city's shifting backdrop is impossible to forget.” The first chapter is available online at the NYT website. Readers should sneak a peek as well as read over the review, which calls the book “extraordinary”. Columbia University Press is the publisher.
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