I never thought I would live to review a novel set in modern Taiwan as brilliant as this one. There can be no serious doubt that Lessons in Essence is the most ambitious work of fiction set here ever attempted in English. That there isn't much competition in the category is simply cause for wilder celebration. Who would have thought that Taiwan would ever give rise to so sophisticated, intelligent and fascinating a piece of literature?
The book has all the hallmarks of literary originality. Its plot is slight, concerning an aging teacher of art and music who one day walks away from his life in Taipei's Kungkuan district to live in Yangmingshan and write a book on aesthetics. Little happens. His wife is away in New York, an affair he's started with a student receives scant development, a Yangmingshan neighbor serves little function other than to provide for some broad (but pointed) comedy. Yet nothing could drag me away from this novel, and it seemed in some eerie way to concern my own life and concerns in a way I hadn't before thought possible. And set in Taiwan too! I could hardly believe my luck.
The reason the plot is slight is that the author's interests lie elsewhere. Born in Alabama, Dana Standridge lived in Taiwan for 12 years, beginning in 1985, but no job she might have found could have matched the range of interests reflected here — Brahms, Joyce, ornithology, the earth's polar magnetism, Epictetus, sun rituals, numerology ... . Often I just gasped. Whatever else it is, this extraordinary novel has more in common with Proust or Flaubert than it ever has with the typical American blockbuster.
Teacher Li, the central character, is a cross between Joyce's Leopold Bloom, Fielding's Parson Adams and Cervantes' Don Quixote. He's a major fictional creation. He appears ineffectual, pottering about his chaotic Taipei apartment, adjusting the silk strings of his guqin (Chinese lute, 古琴), masturbating with childish innocence in his bath, recalling his childhood as he eats his breakfast at a roadside stall in Yangmingshan village, and simultaneously in love with, and exasperated by, the wild plants in his mountain yard. But underneath it all he's preparing to write a profound treatise on beauty, in the ancient Chinese tradition of the scholar who retires to the country to contemplate essential reality before finally expiring.
Lessons in Essence gets under Taiwan's skin in numerous ways. Among the many things featured, often wittily and invariably with close observation, are Taipei's MRT, garbage trucks, blue magpies, whistling thrushes and serpent eagles (plus many other birds), Ghost Month rituals, the unique-to-Taiwan wood cicada, the Gold River development, an abandoned Yangmingshan brothel, monkeys, hundred-pacer snakes, earthquake stories, the Taiwan red pine (plus many other trees), Taipei taxis and their drivers, the fashionable young on motorbikes, Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), not named, but unmistakable), and the peach and lavender clouds of sunset. Joyce didn't observe Dublin more closely.
Taiwan's history, and its difficult relations with China, are treated with great subtlety. Teacher Li dreams of both entities, sometimes separately, sometimes together. Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) "butchering" of the traditional Chinese script is lamented, as are Taiwanese politicians who might contemplate voting their country out of existence. The Confucian reverence of student for teacher is seen as being alive and well here, and there's even a farmer's family that still reveres the Japanese emperor. The Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, which are telescoped virtually to coincide with the 2004 assassination attempt on President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), make some characters wonder about the continuing US commitment to Taiwan.
Dana Standridge's style is especially notable. She's capable of several varieties, including the sophisticated delineation of character through speech patterns, something more to be expected from the traditional, plot-and-character-driven novel than in a ruminative book of this kind. Sometime she goes into brain-frenzy mode, pouring out imaginative fantasies or verbal spirals sparked by a particular topic. But it isn't only the expression in this book that's subtle and sophisticated. So too, almost invariably, is the thought behind it.
There's comedy here as well — indeed, the hint of comedy is rarely absent, and this novel is by no means heavy-going. A former colleague of Li, the flamboyant and super-confident Dr. Gao, is introduced late in the story, possibly to allow for more narrative vigor than had been possible when it concerned only the lovable Li. But there have been earlier comic eruptions, notably the wonderful taxi driver who first brings Li to his mountain home, desperate to offer him a cigarette in what the author calls "a Taiwan tradition now legislated into extinction."
Samuel Johnson said that all books are the products of other books, and many celebrated titles indeed appear here, among them Crime and Punishment, David Copperfield, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and To the Lighthouse. Occasional laments for the current state of academic life also occur — the increasing specialization of education and the disappearance of the apparently once-loved card catalogue.
But this marvelous novel is sensual as well as highly intelligent. The women in it are often viewed erotically — quite something from a 40-year-old married female novelist. An old Chinese catalogue of sexual positions makes an amusing appearance in Teacher Li's reveries, and the author herself has no reservations about treating sex graphically where necessary.
The title is one of this book's best jokes. It's what Teacher Li plans to call his great work on aesthetics, prompted by the name of the route on which his upland retreat stands, Essence Mountain Road. Standridge has one of her characters observe in desperation, "Who'd read a book called Lessons in Essence? Honestly ... ."
Above all else, though, Lessons in Essence combines exuberance with poise. It's a book to make you happy, and happy, too, to be living here. It's also the closest thing to an English-language literary masterpiece about Taiwan we're ever likely to see.
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