Cat by Qian Zhongshu: A Translation and Critical Introduction

The name Qian Zhongshu conjures up a plethora of epithets: scholar, writer, critic, savant; a man with prodigious memory and inimitable intellect; an erudite comparatist with an encyclopedic command of the most obscure sources in both Chinese and world literature; a modern sage and intellectual par excellence who has withered the sociopolitical storms of half a century and still maintained a tranquility of mind and spirit. The corpus of Qian’s creative writing is not large: one justly celebrated novel Weicheng (FORTRESS BESIEGED) and a few stories, of which Cat is one of the more famous. Yet it has earned an assured and unique place in the history of modern Chinese fiction.