Cold Nights
A tubercular proofreader in wartime Chongqing copies out books he despises for a wage that buys less each week, while his mother and his educated wife conduct a war of attrition through him — one insisting on the old duties owed a son, the other on a salary and a life of her own. Air-raid sirens, price rises and the news from the front go on outside the rented rooms, and the cough gets worse. Written as the war ended, it is Ba Jin's bleakest book and the one that gives up the revolutionary consolation his early novels still offered.
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Attributes
Genre
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
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- 58% · 13 shared
- 58% · 13 shared
- 58% · 11 shared