Yang Mu's memoir provides rich insight into the author's personal experience, merging human psychology, history, geography and Taiwan's topography into a thick portrait of life in Taiwan during the middle of the twentieth century.
Paul Manfredi, Pacific Lutheran University Memories of Mount Qilai is a landmark in Taiwanese literature as well as in modern Chinese prose. It has reinvented ... Read morethe genre of literary autobiography by welding together a paean to the beauty of indigenous landscapes and peoples, a penetrating look at the social and political transformations in postwar Taiwan, an honest and moving bildungsroman, and, above all, a poetic language that is supple and sinewy at the same time. Written by one of the greatest poets writing in Chinese in our time, Memories of Mount Qilai is a Mount Everest in world literature.
Michelle Yeh, University of California, Davis Yang Mu is one of the greatest living poets in the Chinese language. His Memories of Mount Qilai is a key work in which he recounts his formative years in Hualien. Memory and identity are indelibly linked; subtle observations of inner states of mind and the outer world are captured in his neoclassicist, poetically charged prose. A classic of autobiographical writing from Taiwan.
Goran Malmqvist, member of the Swedish Academy From the pen of one of the foremost poets writing in Chinese today, Yang Mu's Memories of Mount Qilai plumbs the interior depths of the man and exterior highlights of his homeland, Taiwan. Its musings are at different times humorous, curious, sickened, and angry. No other book like it exists in modern Chinese, and as such it typifies the unique character of this fine author.
Christopher Lupke, Washington State University Beautifully rendered into English by the translation team of John and Yingtsih Balcom. This is an impressive feat considering that the power of Yang's prose emerges from its subtle descriptions and lyrical imagery. Taiwan Review Show Less