![]() ![]() I open this review with a hat tip to Star Wars, in part because trying to offer a plot synopsis of Monkey King in a thousand-word essay would be like trying to capture Lucas’s oeuvre within the same confines-the result would be something bloodless and boring like “A band of unlikely, supernatural and flawed heroes join forces for a quest seeking the Holy Grail of their era, sacred Buddhist sutras far away in the West. ![]() … it was such a disgrace for a man of literary reputation to produce a novel in the vulgar tongue that the story was published anonymously. And “anonymous” because, as scholar and eventual Ambassador to the United States, Hu Shih, suggests in his introduction to the venerable Arthur Waley translation of 1943: “Assembled” because Monkey King, or Journey to the West (c 1580), is in substantial part a collection of the folk tales of many previous centuries, based on the legendary journeys of a T’ang Dynasty (618-906) monk, Tripitaka. Centuries ago, in an empire far far away, an anonymous journeyman scribe authored and assembled a picaresque that became one of China’s most revered and influential literary works. ![]()
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