Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters.

• Author: KROLL, PAUL W.

Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters. By QIAN ZHONGSHU Selected and translated by RONALD C. EGAN. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. 44. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 1998. Pp. 483. $45.

There is no doubt that Qian Zhongshu is a scholar of global learning. From his earliest publications, more than half a century ago, his omnivorous interests in all areas and genres of Chinese literature as well as his truly startling command of medieval and modern European literature (read in the original languages) have been apparent. Whether as scholar, essayist, or novelist, Qian has always been a writer who expects much from his readers, projecting a resonance both deep (within the Chinese tradition) and broad (across Western cultures) that is often taxing if not downright daunting to comprehend. None of his writings are more difficult or more rewarding than the random essays on literature that make up the four volumes of what he called the Guanzhui bian, literally The Tube and Awl Collection, or, in his own English rendering, Limited Views.

First published in 1979, these essays are the fruit of decades of work and have spawned in China a cottage industry of commentary and annotation. Written in a particularly dense and complexly woven vein of the classical language, the almost fifteen hundred essays that comprise Limited Views are packed with musings, allusions, surprising juxtapositions of all manner of texts. The originals were untitled, each simply being given a tag quotation from one or another line of various classical texts that served as the jumping-off point for a discussion that might meander through thoughts drawn from thousands of years of Chinese and Western literature, replete with interjected quotations from poetry and prose in half a dozen languages. While the essays came to be grouped under ten books or collections (Zhou Yi, Mao Shih, Zuo zhuan, Shiji, Laozi Wang Bi zhu, Liezi Zhang Zhan zhu, Jiaoshi Yilin, Chuci Hong Xingzu buzhu, Taiping guangji, and Quan Shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen), such a classification masks the wealth of reference and flexibility of topic to be found in any individual item. A reader who is interested in, say, Qian's comments on the Chuci cannot restrict himself only to the thirty-nine entries that make up that section of Limited Views; references are scattered throughout the book, because the book is not in fact a commentary on specific classical texts but an...