Reading Dwelling Narrowness (蜗居)

[simc]

This is the novel from which the the controversial and popular TV series was adapted. The TV series has already been discussed on this site.
 
One nice thing about this book is it seems quite accessible, and I found the soap opera style plot line about adultery and money troubles quite engaging. I can listen to the audiobook and feel I that I can get the gist of what is going on.
 
The book and audiobook are both available from amazon.cn.



I thought that the audiobook was pretty well voice acted. It seems to have the same piece of background music playing for 20 hours, but that didn't really bother me.

Okay, lets begin!

[simc]

I've just realized I've put "Snail Office" (is that the commercial property equivalent?) as the title by choosing the wrong character for ju. Not sure if I can change that.

[roddy]

Fixed the typo for you. 

 

If the book is relatively easy to read, this'd be a great choice for Chinese learners. Thanks for posting!

[simc]

There is a sentence about Haiping towards her son:

 

其实孩子离开娘已经两年，海萍对儿子的思念，都快成祥林嫂那样了

 

Who was 祥林嫂? Seems to be from Lu Xun's novel 祝福. Anyone read it?

[gato]

祥林嫂 is from Lun Xun's story and is now used to refer to someone who whines all the time.

[simc]

I've finished listening to the audiobook, now I'm going to read it.

 

I've realized that there are two types of language in the book: dialogue between characters and narration. The dialogue between characters is usually easy to understand but the narration is more difficult. If you can understand the dialogue then you can pretty much understand the plot.

[simc]

I've found another Woju audiobook from TingMedia

http://www.tingmedia.com/Story.aspx?id=21398

This one isn't nearly as good as the 道途听说 production, it seems more like it is read out than voice acted. But if you want to study from this book I think there is some value in having the same thing read out by different people.

[Beelzebro]

Has anyone run this book through Chinese Text Analyser? I'm just wondering how it compares with 活着 in terms of difficulty.