[A] book of manners for the debauched. Its readers in the late Ming period likely hid it under their bedcovers.
Amy Tan, New York Times Book Review Praise for the previous volumes: [I]t is time to remind ourselves that The Plum in the Golden Vase is not just about sex, whether the numerous descriptions of sexual acts throughout the ... Read morenovel be viewed as titillating, harshly realistic, or, in Mr. Roy's words, intended 'to express in the most powerful metaphor available to him the author's contempt for the sort of persons who indulge in them.' The novel is a sprawling panorama of life and times in urban China, allegedly set safely in the Sung dynasty, but transparently contemporary to the author's late sixteenth-century world, as scores of internal references demonstrate. The eight hundred or so men, women, and children who appear in the book cover a breath-taking variety of human types, and encompass pretty much every imaginable mood and genre
from sadism to tenderness, from light humor to philosophical musings, from acute social commentary to outrageous satire.
Jonathan Spence, New York Review of Books Clearly David Roy is the greatest scholar-translator in the field of premodern vernacular Chinese fiction... The puns and various other kinds of word plays that abound in the Chin P'ing Mei are so difficult to translate that I can't help 'slapping the table in amazement' each time I see evidence of Roy's masterful rendition of them... I recommend this book, in the strongest possible terms, to anyone interested in the novel form in general, in Chinese literature in particular, or in the translation of Chinese literature.
Shuhui Yang, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews Racy, colloquial, and robustly scatalogical, [this translation] could only have been done now, when our literary language has finally shed its Victorian values. David Tod Roy enters with zest into the spirit and the letter of the original, quite surpassing ... earlier versions.
Paul St. John Mackintosh, Literary Review Reading Roy's translation is a remarkable experience.
Robert Chatain, Chicago Tribune Review of Books [B]y virtue of both Roy's decision to translate the cihua version of the novel, and his manner of doing so, we have here an invaluable insight into the material and popular literary world of the late-Ming that will serve as a wonderful resource for students of the various aspects of this fascinating and rapidly changing period of late imperial Chinese history for many years to come.
Duncan Campbell, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies Show Less