The beleaguered Fortaleza

I read The Beleaguered Fortaleza some years ago. There seemed to me one of the best contemporary novels of China, and I felt a certain sorrow that in a publishing panorama dominated by the translations from English or French of the works of the exiled Chinese authors, was paying so little attention to the literature produced inside China, authentic masterpieces being despised thus.

The Beleaguered Fortaleza is an uncomfortable work, placed in a period when the values that have determined the vital attitudes of generations of persons, are collapsing without still there arising the new some which to stick, shows the history of a young man adrift in the middle of a society, and of a country also adrift. In the middle of this human tide in movement, the achievement of seemingly simple tasks acquires an epic, dramatic character, which little by little is taking possession of the personage, of the novel, to cover with a dramatic aura the most innocent activities.

Although the protagonist of The Beleaguered Fortaleza stands out in the middle of this undecided ambience for his own indecisions, that they are leading him for a descending spiral of the one that every time they show themselves less bulging, the somewhat mean logic of his decisions, it is taking the reader to the same blind alley, for which the protagonist and the reader seem destined not only, but all the personages, the whole world that surrounds them, the whole country.

Description of the publisher: Ambientada in the thirties, narrates the history of Fang Hongjian, son of an ancient official of the dynasty Qing, who goes to study Europe and, to the beginning of the Chinese-Japanese war, it returns with a false doctorate title and without to know what to do with his life. The itinerary of Fang Hongjian describes an unusual sentimental education. And the incident of the protagonist gives place to a portrait, so sharply as sarcastically, of the decline of the millennial Chinese civilization, the emptiness of his intellectual circles, the occidentalización impostada and snob, the muddy rituals for which it thinks up the social life and, anyway, the picaresque novel with which the individuals avoid the obstacles and displeasures of the everyday life.

Qian Zhongshu. - The beleaguered fortitude. Anagram. 2009

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