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Vol. 3 is when everything starts to fall apart for the family. Not even the poetry club can stay together. The girls start to grow up and get married off or die. This fall is linked/shadowed by the illness of Xi-feng, such an organiser and leader in the first 2 novels is here rendered entirely powerless by miscarrying a son, it is (I think) largely due to her absence and illness that things start to fall apart so drasticly.
Memorable moments from Vol. 3: Grandma Jia gives her speech about how songs aren't realistic because the young girls only have one maid. Xifeng becomes ill and the girls take over. The garden is divided up. 200 pages of mostly maids' stories. The singers are assigned as maids, love affairs, and cross dressing ensues. Baoyu has his birthday party where everyone gets drunk, Zheng dies and the story of Jie Er and Jie San. Interesting to see that it is only after Xifeng's miscarriage that her husband goes off in search of this "2nd wife". Hawkes mentions how the story of jie san seems thrown in from a different story about the monk with the magic mirror and messes up the chronology of the er jie story. Still it was interesting this time to get that the person she was in love with was the straight opera singer who'd beaten up Huan. I think he kinda deserved such misery. It's interesting to see how after this despite her best efforts, Xifeng starts to loose some of her credibility and power within the households. Whether this is due to the new concubines, the death of erjie or the fact that she was ill for so long after her miscarriage is hard to say. Time seems to be going quite quickly in this book, and on page 400 it's already "over a year" since the last meeting of the poetry club. I wish I could find a list of what was supposed to happen when and how old everyone is supposed to be as it can be quite confusing.
The last part of the book looks has Grandmother Jia's 80th birthday, and the Moon Festival, Dai Yu and Xiang yun composing poetry was great. I also loved how fiesty Tan Chun got towards the end. And I have to say I really enjoyed Bao-Yu's elegy for "Skybright". Xue pan and his wife were amusing, I realised that xue pan is so the normal leading character of novels, (such as jin ping mei) but here he is gently ridiculed for his behaviour instead.
It seemed like things were slowly starting to unravel and everyone was growing up and dying. The families were starting to become seperated and money was becoming more of an issue, and as Xifeng became less powerful the servants gained more freedom to cause trouble. It is a shame that the next 40 chapters were not successfully kept. But will start the next volume of this translation now.
Memorable moments from Vol. 3: Grandma Jia gives her speech about how songs aren't realistic because the young girls only have one maid. Xifeng becomes ill and the girls take over. The garden is divided up. 200 pages of mostly maids' stories. The singers are assigned as maids, love affairs, and cross dressing ensues. Baoyu has his birthday party where everyone gets drunk, Zheng dies and the story of Jie Er and Jie San. Interesting to see that it is only after Xifeng's miscarriage that her husband goes off in search of this "2nd wife". Hawkes mentions how the story of jie san seems thrown in from a different story about the monk with the magic mirror and messes up the chronology of the er jie story. Still it was interesting this time to get that the person she was in love with was the straight opera singer who'd beaten up Huan. I think he kinda deserved such misery. It's interesting to see how after this despite her best efforts, Xifeng starts to loose some of her credibility and power within the households. Whether this is due to the new concubines, the death of erjie or the fact that she was ill for so long after her miscarriage is hard to say. Time seems to be going quite quickly in this book, and on page 400 it's already "over a year" since the last meeting of the poetry club. I wish I could find a list of what was supposed to happen when and how old everyone is supposed to be as it can be quite confusing.
The last part of the book looks has Grandmother Jia's 80th birthday, and the Moon Festival, Dai Yu and Xiang yun composing poetry was great. I also loved how fiesty Tan Chun got towards the end. And I have to say I really enjoyed Bao-Yu's elegy for "Skybright". Xue pan and his wife were amusing, I realised that xue pan is so the normal leading character of novels, (such as jin ping mei) but here he is gently ridiculed for his behaviour instead.
It seemed like things were slowly starting to unravel and everyone was growing up and dying. The families were starting to become seperated and money was becoming more of an issue, and as Xifeng became less powerful the servants gained more freedom to cause trouble. It is a shame that the next 40 chapters were not successfully kept. But will start the next volume of this translation now.