The Ancient Ship, by Zhang Wei

I saw this book at our local Costco. Someone had placed it on top of laundry detergents. The description on the back cover intrigued me. Although I'm fluent in Chinese, over the years, having read no Chinese books, I have left myself at a point where I can no longer absorb literary Chinese writing. My eyes would glaze over "fancy" words and expressions, while my brain registered no meaning. Perhaps, I thought, I could give an English translation a try.

So far, the experiment has been a failure. The main reason is actually an old problem of mine. Due to my lack of imagination, I tend to have a difficult time relating to people with whom I have nothing in common. When I was young, I loved novels about high school students or university life, that was the environment familiar to me. As for stories about the countryside, they might as well have taken place on Jupiter. I thought I had grown out of this limitation, now that I was older and more worldly. Unfortunately, no, I'm as uninterested in peasant life as ever. And The Ancient Ship is all about the countryside.

The second problem is to be expected: too much is lost in the translation. The names, when not in their native Chinese form, are awkward and impossible to remember. The sentences are stiff. The story line seems to jump around in a semi-random fashion. I soldiered on for about a hundred pages, but found myself exhausted. Maybe I'll go back to it later when I'm desperate for reading material...