A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide.

• Author: Schonebaum, Andrew

A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide. By SUSAN CHAN EGAN and PAI HSIEN-YUNG. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2021. Pp. 312. $145 (cloth); $35 (paper and e-book).

It can be tough for scholars who work on The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng) to step back from the minutiae of textual issues or cultural debates and to recapture the wonder and the love meeting its characters for the first time. The prefaces and commentary to Stone implore us to look at the author's art, the message, the language, and to not fall in love with the characters. Susan Chan Egan and Pai Hsien-Yung's Companion to the Story of the Stone, with its infectious enthusiasm for the story and its characters, is a welcome corrective for those of us who sometimes lose the forest for the trees. It is written for readers with no prior knowledge of Chinese culture or language, but even literary scholars and seasoned readers of Stone will find in it all kinds of interesting insights.

The thing that makes companions or abridgements useful is the same thing that makes maps useful--that things get left out. We think of guides as something you read after you become lost, but perhaps they are best used to prepare the reader for the journey. They enable the reader to pay attention to the details, because she already knows the basic plot. In that way, companions also entice readers to fill the lacunae themselves.

Companion is keyed to each chapter of the Hawks-Minford translation of Stone. Each chapter gets about a one-page summary and one page of comments, though these become sparser toward the end of the book. Companion is brilliant in its observations but also in its selections. Publishers force us to learn the art of leaving things out, and Chan Egan and Pai judiciously opt for the main branches of the plot, leaving smaller ones to the reader to grasp on her own. The summaries avoid oversimplification, though, and include many illustrative details and reminders ("the tent-like summer bed;" "Shi Xiangyun, an orphan herself..."). I imagine I will use Companion in the classroom to stitch together selected readings from Stone, with the summaries bridging omitted chapters.

Stone was written when someone might read one very long novel again and again. Even Chairman Mao claimed to have read it five times. Nevertheless, commentary was layered upon commentary, pointing out all of the clever and beautiful passages and every aspect of the artistic achievement...