Chinese Writer Lu Xun

J. F. Jenner had provided a great account of renowned Chinese writer Lu Xun (pictured), whom he described as "one of those writers, very rare in any culture, whose honesty, intelligence, perception and ability to handle written language makes almost any page he wrote a pleasure to read."

Jenner added that Lu Xun's language is dense, sometimes hard to unravel, closer to classical than to the standard, Peking-influenced vernacular style, "and all that is part of the delight of it." (The Tyranny of History - The Roots of China's Crisis, The Penguin Press, 1994)

Lu Xun is said to have overcome "the normally irresistible tendency in the culture to write dishonestly and to strike poses, and he refuses to play nearly all the games to which so many of his talented contemporaries and successors succumbed."

Jenner added: "Cao Xueqin and Lu Xun are among those few writers in all of literature who grow with repeated reading. They use the infinite resources of written Chinese, at all its levels, with such mastery that one is convinced while reading them that even in recent centuries it is the supreme medium for written expression."

"But they are such towering exceptions to the run of Chinese writers in the last few hundred years that their achievements only remind us just how difficult it is to write Chinese that is both vigorous and subtle, that draws on the riches of the past without being overwhelmed by them, that is as vague or precise as the writer chooses, and that can breathe with the rhythms of speech or cut free from them."

Breathtaking description, I thought.