Reading 鬼吹灯 - pulpy supernatural fiction

[Kamille]

had discovered that a ghost episode was missing in the beginning, but it seems I was wrong.

What do you mean you were wrong?

If you are talking about the Taiwanese issue, it's only normal that the ghosts stories were printed as they were: Taiwan never had a Cultural Revolution. Ghosts are still well alive (  ) here.

Or were you talking about issues printed on the continent? In that case, yeah, that's becoming complicated.

[laurenth]

See post #3

[Kamille]

Hmm I took it as a joke from Demonic_Duck. I don't think he was serious.

[laurenth]

Oops [blushing]silly me[/blushing]. That said, if you're not there yet, you will see in the last part that our heroes ask themselves many questions about the reality or unreality of what's happening around them.

[laurenth]

Voilà, I've finished reading 鬼吹灯. I'd like to add a few final comments, but for anyone who may want to read the book in the future (or who has not reached the end yet), I'm using the "spoiler" tag, even if I'm not going into many details about the plot.

 

 

 

Among the good moments of the second part of the book, there are two sand storm episodes. The author gives the impression that he has really lived and survived such storms, with vivid details like:

 

 

我和胖子拼了命地铲沙子，安力满老汉安置完骆驼也过来帮忙，在骆驼周围筑起了一道简易的防沙墙，然后用毯子把骆驼的眼睛蒙上，防止它们受惊逃窜，众人也各自裹上毯子围在一起。

 

 

Also, the last part of the book is almost an illustration of 庄子's famous 蝴蝶 fable. More than once, our heroes (and the reader) no longer know what's real and what's unreal:

 

真实虚幻已经没有明显的界限了。......... 说不定咱们根本就没进过精绝古城，这一切都是那鬼花造出的幻象。

 

 

However in the end, 张牧野 can't help resorting, for the second time, to a deus ex machina to help the survivors, under the form of the legendary white camel:

 

白骆驼出现在受诅咒的黑沙漠，这说明古老的诅咒已经消失了，胡大又收回了这片沙漠，跟着胡大的使者，一定可以找到水。

 

 

So, there, as I've already explained many times why I like this book and why I encourage other people to read it, I won't repeat that again.

 

One last thing: thanks Roddy!

[Kamille]

Do you know that there are 4 books in total? And a sequel consisting in 4 more books? Your reading is far from finished

[laurenth]

Yes, I know there's a total of 8 books. But as it took me nearly 3 months to read vol. 1, that would make almost two years of daily tomb raiding. I'd go crazy. Of course, I could hope that my reading speed will increase, as I'm getting more familiar with the style and the vocab, and as my Chinese might improve in the process. However, the total time I can devote to reading will not increase. It could even decrease, if anything. But who knows? Maybe there will be a Grand Tomb Raiding Literature project in which I could take part.

[michaelS]

Update: I've been reading for about three weeks, about 60 pages in. It's much more difficult than anything i've read before, but I'm really enjoying it. Thanks very much to everyone who recommended or discussed the book above

 

My version was bought from a bookshop in Dalian, it says 'new edition' on the (beautiful) cover, and I can confirm that there are no ghost stories within (only earthquakes, bear attacks, avalanches, salamanders, bootleg pop songs, the China-Vietnam war, opium, and lots of grave robbing)

[Kamille]

I would like to read that version in order to compare with the original. Did they simply elude everything supernatural? The thought gives me the creeps. It's like if someone made a hamburger with olives in it and that the restaurant, because of some law, decided to take them out before selling the burger. You'll never know what it was intended to taste like. Of course it can't be as good as good as the original because the olives were not taken out because of culinary reasons but because someone decided that olives are not good for you.

 

There is exactly 400 pages in the original version of the book. How many in yours michaelS?

 

Apart form that I have a question. Actually more then one but I'll ask the others later. The thing is that the book is filled with sentence constructions that are never (or rarely) used in Taiwan. I can understand them but sometimes I'm not sure about the pronunciation. For example I came across this expression  : "就這麼地了". If I'm not mistaken it's a continental equivalent of "就這樣了". Question is: since 地 has many pronunciations, how should I read it in this case?

[michaelS]

Page count: 257! Quite small text though. There are thirty-three chapters, how many in yours?

[Kamille]

50 chapters. 

 

As for the size of the text, a complete vertical line consists in 42 characters (including punctuation) and a complete page has 19 lines. 

 

Thus, if we assume that every page is entirely full (which is never the case but it makes the counting easier), there is 42*19*400=319.200 characters in the whole book.

 

How about yours?

[michaelS]

32 lines

33 characters per line if full

257 pages

 

270,000+ characters. Some pretty hefty cuts, then, about 15%

 

I read an article in Timeout Beijing when I was there last weekend:

 

He [an unnamed Western director] had been flown over, at considerable expense [...] but his initial enthusiasm for the film - an adaptation of a Chinese adventure bestseller - rapidly disappeared.

 

For starters, they were told that they could film in the capital, but they couldn't call it 'Beijing', because the local government might get upset about a negative portrayal.

 

'Then the design team kept giving us the wrong costumes and sets,' the director complained. 'I told them we wanted a particular ancient style, and it was all 19th century wardrobe.' I suggested that was probably because the studio had an excess of Qing product, and figured they could foist it off on them.

 

'Then we were looking for a desert to film in, because we couldn't film where the book was set for political reasons. There were two deserts, but one was far better. Then we were told that we had to pick the less suitable one, because otherwise the owner of the other would hire thugs and try to disrupt the production.'

 

One exchange captured the essence of the problem. 'We wanted a scene in a train station,' he told me, 'in the US, any station would be eager to cooperate for free, for publicity. But here, nobody wanted to do it.'

 

After they'd quit and headed back to the US, the film's orginal scriptwriter later wrote to me: 'In the end, the authorities told us that we would have to ditch our entire script and have one written by a local.'

 

Could this be about the film of 鬼吹灯? Some of the details sound right. And the film version seems to have been delayed hugely

[Kamille]

What doesn't sound right on the other hand is the foreign director and the foreign scriptwriter. Besides I don't remember that the book's depiction of Beijing could be in any ways taken as offensive by the government.

[imron]

You'd be surprised by the list of things that the Chinese government finds offensives/says hurts the feelings of the Chinese people.

[Lu]

Saw some news about the movie version today.

'While it's still unclear when the film adaptation of The Grave Robbers' Chronicles, which is currently in pre-production, will release, The Ghouls is set to release on December 18, 2015. Director Wuershan, known for fantasy blockbuster Painted Skin II, will step behind the directorial helm, while Taiwan director and scriptwriter Chen Kuo-fu will act as producer. The author of Ghost Blows Out the Light, Zhang Muye, or as he is known by his pen name Tianxia Bachang, is also on the team as a scriptwriter. No names for the lead roles have been announced yet, but it's pretty much a guarantee that considering the popularity of this series the production company will do its best to get A-list actors so as not to disappoint audiences.'

[Kamille]

That's 盜墓筆記, not 鬼吹燈.

 

(Edited, I read too quickly: didn't see the stuff about Ghouls. What is Ghouls ?)

[mouse]

 

'While it's still unclear when the film adaptation of The Grave Robbers' Chronicles, which is currently in pre-production, will release, The Ghouls [...] The author of Ghost Blows Out the Light, Zhang Muye, or as he is known by his pen name Tianxia Bachang, is also on the team as a scriptwriter.

 

So wait, are they talking about 鬼吹灯 (Ghost Blows Out the Light) or 盗墓笔记 (The Grave Robbers' Chronicles)？

 

edit: sorry, redundant.

[Kamille]

Yeah the article is unclear. Once it talks about "The Ghouls" and the next about "Ghost Blows Out the Light", but after some research it actually seems to be the same movie : "Ghost Blows Out the Light : The Ghouls" right? (鬼吹灯·寻龙诀).

[laurenth]

Therefore, just to stay on the safe side, let's read both books

 

Member Gleaves left some comments and links about 盗墓笔记, here and here.

 

 

As 盗墓笔记 is sitting on a shelf at home, I'll try to read it when I have finished "流星•蝴蝶•剑" (though I may read vol. II of 圈子圈套 before that).

[michaelS]

I'm coming to the end of Volume 2 (龙岭迷窟), and thought I would give people an update.

 

This volume continues directly from the end of Vol. 1 - the first sentence is something like "after arriving back to Beijing, I...". You can see that the division into seperate print editions is maybe a little arbitrary. The first part is the two leads messing around in Beijing, as fun as ever.

 

After that they head off into a tomb (no surprise, I guess), and the action gets bogged down for what felt like a very long time. The thing with reading a book like this is that, if the story is interesting, you can zoom along, but if it gets a bit repetitive, and involves lots of movement, physical description, specific actions and so on, it gets quite hard to read. This part probably took me more than three months to get through, reading very occasionally, as my motivation suffered. This section is slightly redeemed by a giant spider attack and some jade that smells of chocolate.

 

But! The moment when they come out of the cave, the action kicks off, and the next 40 pages are brilliant! We see the appearance of an ancient character whose meaning has been classified by the government - anyone obsessed with Chinese is bound to love this.

 

Then the action jumps back in time about 100 years, and lots of new characters are introduced. I was a bit disappointed with this shift, but after a little while I figured out who the central character in this story must be, and that keeps you interested. This part can be summed up as the opening to a joke: "A Buddhist, a Daoist, and a priest walk into a tomb..." We see the introduction of different disciplines of grave-robber, aside from the 摸金校尉 .

 

The author definitely had some fun making suspenseful, cliffhanger-y final lines to chapters:

 

"Lao Hu, what's that growing on your back?"

"That character has been classified, I refuse to tell you any more!"

"Wait a second - this boat is haunted!"

"How is it possible that there would be a black Buddha in this tomb?"

 

Oh yeah, and there is a part where a grave-robber gets attacked by a load of cats while trying to undress a mummy, and has to scare them off without extinguishing his candle. I want to see this on film!

 

(A student gave me all eight volumes for Christmas, so I guess I will slowly be reading these for the rest of my life...)