.. .: :: Francesca's delirium :: :. ..

Hello world!
Just to start with a glimpse at my everyday life, one of the thousands kinds of junk food I'm eating here: Chinese marshmallows!!!
I know, there is some text written in Japanese, but they are Chinese.


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Now, let's get serious. (^_^)
My English hasn't improved at all since I arrived to this rainy island.
And this term I'll have some written tests to pass.
One of them consists in writing a review.
I must practice, and this blog gives me the opportunity to do that.
Maybe I can ask my tutor to correct them... Haha I think she would have a heart attack!

SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS!!!

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“Village of Stone”, by Xiaolu

Coral is 28 years old. She lives with her boyfriend Red on the ground floor of a 25-storey block in Beijing. She works part-time in a video rental shop.
Her boyfriend is not doing much with his life, but he’s financially helped by his parents. His only interest seems to be taking part and winning at Frisbee competitions.
The couple lives a quite squalid and monotonous life.
One day, Coral receives a packet. The sender’s details are illegible, but it was sent from the Village of Stone, the poor small village of fishermen where she came from. It contains a giant dried eel.

This is the beginning of a long journey to a past which Coral wanted to forget, and of which not even Red is aware of.
Little by little, we learn about the lonely childhood of an unfortunate girl.
Her mother died after giving birth to her and her father fled from the village to escape the fishermen’s life; he never came back, otherwise he would have been imprisoned for his bourgeois ideas.
She lived with her grandparents, who hated each other and never talked to each other, until one day her grandfather committed suicide.
This semi-abandoned creature became an easy prey for the devilish mute, who harassed and eventually raped her.
Later, he fell in love with the school teacher, Mr. Mou, who got her pregnant and forced her to abort. Someway the rumours spread, and Coral left and started a new life in Beijing...

We’ll never find out who sent the eel. But its smell spread all over the building and its tasty flesh that feeds the two young people every day seem to suggest that Coral has still something that binds her to the Village of Stone.
Moreover, a man who claims to be her father visits her one morning, just to let her know that he’s dying with throat cancer.
At the beginning, Coral thinks he’s just a mad man or a maniac and she wants to forget about him. She’s got something else to think about. She is pregnant, and she is going to have an abortion.
Unexpectedly, Red asks her to keep the baby and to get married.
Finally, both have something to cling to.

Coral is ready to start a new life, but before that she still has something to do. She manages to find the man who claimed to be her father and to spend with him the painful last few days of his life.
Then, she visits the Village of Stone with Red, and prays for the souls of her grandparents, and of all the dead people of the village, included the mute (“if there really is an afterlife, I hope that the mute will be reincarnated as a person with the power of speech, so that he can know how it feels to speak, to scream and to cry”).

Red loses his Frisbee in the sea of the Village of Stone. In any case, the baby he wants to have changes him as it changed Coral. He eventually finds a job and the couple is ready to move to a new house.

I simply adore this book.

I love the perfect way it’s written. I love the gloomy atmosphere. I love the presence of the see everywhere: terrible cause of destruction and death but also source of food for all the villagers; you can hear the sound of its waves in the background, you can smell the brackish air everywhere; the same sea used to be Coral’s only friend.

I love the sense of silence.
There was silence between Coral’s grandparents.
The villagers hardly talked to Coral’s grandmother, since she was a foreigner.
Coral’s grandfather killed himself silently, without an explanation.
The mute himself was the most frightening and mischievous character.
Coral didn’t have many people to talk to. Also, she never told anyone about the mute’s harassment. Moreover, when she was kept prisoner in his house, a rug was stuffed into her mouth, to prevent her from shouting.
The mutes’ parents saw what their son was doing, but they didn’t say or do anything.
It’s not written in the book, but in such a small village, I believe it’s impossible that nobody saw what was happening. And still, nobody said anything.
Coral and the man who claimed to be her father couldn’t talk to each other. He had his vocal cords removed.
In a way, silence brings the idea of death all around.
Coral’s first baby, who was never been born, was not even allowed to cry.
But things have changed, and a new life will start soon.

I love the message of not forgetting about one’s origins. Coral with her last visit to the Village of Stone forgave everyone, and forgave life. Finally she found peace.
I would like to quote the whole book, but let me just write part of the ending chapter, when Coral visits the cemetery of the Village of Stone.

“I feel a profound grief, as if my heart is filled with sorrow. It is a sorrow that emanates from these graves, these graves marked with names I know and names I will never know. I grieve for the dead. I have grown up, moved away from the village and become an adult woman. But none of the occupants of this cemetery will ever know this. I want to offer something to each of them, some sort of memorial, no matter how frightening or hateful hey were while alive. All that is left of their lives is this yellow earth, this ancient soil.
I stand in the cemetery on the far side of the mountain and weep. As the harsh ocean winds buffet my skin, I feel the tears down my face, falling to the parched, dry earth below.
On my last day in the village, I face in the direction of the mountain cemetery, kneel down and touch my head to the ground. There, buried in the shadow of the Temple of the Sea Goddess, on that hillside looking out to the sea, are the souls who will live on for ever in my heart.”

→ Excellent book. One of the best novels I’ve ever read!

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“The Painted Veil”, by W. Somerset Maugham.

I definitely have to thank my dearest Cecilia for talking about this movie and book in her blog. I didn’t read her review, because I decided straight away that I had to watch the movie, possibly after reading the book.
What convinced me, was the awe-inspiring poster of the film.
I’ve been lucky enough to have the book lent by Kitty and David (thank you my friends!) and I read it in a few nights, and then I ran to the cinema to watch the movie.
First of all, you might know already how much I usually prefer the book rather than the movie version. And this is what happened.
But I loved the movie as well.
I just think it’s a completely different story!!!

Anyway, let’s start with the book.
I thought it was a romantic novel, I was more than wrong.
And, strangely enough, it’s not a negative comment.
There is something else I really love reading besides romance (^_^): it’s the characters’ psychology. And this is one of the strong points of this books.
The story is quite simple.
The pretty and vain Kitty accepts to marry the boring and cold Walter Fane to run away from her ambitious mother and to get married before her uglier and younger sister Doris. Walter Fane brings her to Hong Kong (in the movie it’s China, not Hong Kong) where he works long hours as a bacteriologist. Here the bored Kitty falls in love with the sexy English Vice Consul Charlie Townsend, and the two become lovers.
When Walter discovers that, he accepts to volunteer as a doctor in the village of Mei-tan-fu, where people are dying like flies because of a cholera epidemic.
Kitty is forced to go with him, after realizing that her lover has no intention to divorce his wife and leave his children to marry her.
In Mei-tan-fu, Kitty grows more mature, while Walter becomes even more silent than before, despising her in his heart, unable to forgive her.
He is eventually infected by cholera and dies. Kitty, pregnant (and not sure about the father) comes back to Hong Kong, where she falls once again in Charles’s arms. Despising herself, she is ready to move back to her family’s house. Her mother dies before she arrives, and Kitty is ready to start a new life with her father, who has never been respected and loved by his wife and daughters and finally deserves a happier life.

This is the original story.
Quite far from being romantic!
Kitty is a spoiled and fun loving lady, not particularly intelligent. But the reader can’t help sympathizing with her. She is humane. She is down to earth. She admits her faults and she asks for forgiveness. Nobody is perfect, after all!
In Mei-tan-fu, witness of horrid deaths, she only asks her husband to be friends, not to make life harder than what it already is.
Walter, on the contrary, is a hopelessly repressed, boring, clumsy man. He should be handsome, but Kitty (and she’s not alone!) is unable to be attracted by him. He is considerate, and polite, very intelligent, but it seems very difficult for Kitty to fall in love with him.
I haven’t understood well why he fell in love with her, and what he expected from her. He knew every silly thought of her, he knew why she married him, he knew she didn’t love him. And still, he fell in love with her and married her.
He was passionate like an ice-lollipop, he talked to his wife only when strictly necessary, he loved her job more than her… How could he have been so shocked that his wife fell for the first good-looking idiot who wooed her properly?
At first, I hoped to see a new Mr. Darcy, or Masumi Hayami, to come out. Maybe the unfaithfulness could give him a shock and wake him up…
Wrong guess!
Walter is simply not humane, I would say diabolical.
He’s proud and serious, unable to forgive a woman he probably idealized, till the end (and unable to forgive himself too).
He gives me gooseflesh to imagine what was in his head when he decided to volunteer in Men-tan-fu. He got completely insane! I can imagine his devilish sneer when he tells his wife about his decision.
If even there were any doubts about his folly, the scene of his death would wipe them off. Kitty, who still doesn’t love him but is sincerely sorry for him, asks him for forgiveness. Even if he’s suffering badly, before dying he manages to say: “The dog it was that died”.
Like everyone, when I finally learnt that it is the last line of Goldsmith’s “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog”, I looked up the poem in internet. I found it, read it, and my last hope of a sign of humanity from that icy dull robot disappeared.
The elegy is about a dog who bit a very good man. Everyone thought the man would die, but in the end it was the dog that died.
I will not comment what the poem actually symbolizes.
What did the mad man mean by whispering this verse before dying, is not 100% sure for me. I don’t think he refers to cholera, but I think he refers to his wife and himself. Even if he knew he was committing suicide by volunteering in Men-tan-fu, he expected his wife to die.

I feel that the death of some characters is a source of relief, for Kitty (Walter’s death) but also for Kitty’s father (Kitty’s mother’s death).
Also, I would say that other two keywords for this novel are punishment and redemption.
Walter punished Kitty for her unfaithfulness, but life itself punished Walter and Kitty’s mother (who dies without knowing about his husband’s promotion) for their stupidity.
At the end of the book, Kitty is finally ready to start a new life, loving her father as she has never done before. The good ones are not the most virtuous ones, but the most humane ones, who made mistake and try to learn from them, who are able to forgive themselves and then the other ones.

I love the final scene of the reconciliation of father and daughter very much.
What a pity it has been completely cut off in the movie!
But this is not the only thing I don’t like.
If you see the poster of the movie, you can read “Forgiveness comes at a price”. Haha. I don’t need to add anything.
Hollywood is Hollywood.
Walter Fane on the big screen is just someone else. He’s sexy and charming, he’s far from looking boring and cold; in Men-tan-fu he shows his feelings for his wife more than once and eventually jumps on her (lucky Naomi!!!). He becomes sweet and passionate, he doesn’t even care if he might not be the father of Kitty’s baby. Who’s this man who stole Walter’s role?
Obviously, I loved the movie. The photography is very good, Naomi Watts is perfect, Ed Norton is… Wow! The movie is skilfully created to enter your heart and break it into pieces.
I really like it (and I will probably buy the DVD), if I consider it an other story from the book I read.
1. Walter is not Walter the robot, but a sexy mortal man who makes teenagers’ eyes get starry (LOL am I a teenager?)
2. Charlie is less charming than Walter’s shoes, while in the book he’s supposed to be irresistible.
3. The Mother Superior is neglected in the movie, but in the book she is one of the most wonderful characters
4. I wrote this already, the final scene has been cut off! *sigh*
5. In the last part, Kitty says that she hopes her baby will be a girl, so that she can give her a different education from the one she has received. When I read that, I thought: “Haha, at the cinema it would be a boy, named after the father – actually supposed father”. I’ve seen that too many times in the movies. I hoped so much this wouldn’t happen in this movie. Unluckily, it happened :p
6. Kitty in the movie ignores Charlie when she meets him again in China (in the book Hong Kong) after Walter’s death… But well, since the story had been already so much changed (Kitty basically fell in love with Walter, which never happens in the book), this had to happen!!!
In spite of that, the movie is more than worth seeing.
The novel is not so popular, so if you don’t care about reading a very good book, don’t bother. If you do, just watch the movie forgetting the book.
Fall in love with Ed Norton’s Walter, and cry for his death, and enjoy the photography. There are a few beautiful romantic scenes created for the movie (I like the scene of the piano very much!).
And, my very favourite scene in the book exists also in the movie!
I’m talking about the scene where she eats salad in Men-tan-fu, even if it’s very dangerous, and then he eats it too. It’s completely insane, perfect for Maya and Masumi! I got crazy when I read that part!!!

→ Highly recommended!
→ I also really love the soundtrack. Must find it soon!!!

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