The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Li Po)
Ha Jin
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Li Po)
Ha Jin
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
A rich, moving and titillating account of the poet’s life. The Li Po that emerges from this tale is a figure we know so well and yet hardly.
In The Banished Immortal, a biography of Li, the novelist Ha Jin narrates the poet’s unusual life with erudition and empathy.
A typical biography, spanning the life and career of the eighth-century poet, but Ha Jin's masterful style and deep affection for his subject make the book a pleasure to read--especially for those unfamiliar with Li Bai or Chinese poetry in general.
A kind of hagiography that is both scholarly and emotionally engaging.
[Li Ba's] life, as distinguished poet and fiction writer Ha Jin so limpidly relays it, was peripatetic rather than domestic, usually away from the family he strove to support.
Ha Jin takes an wide-ranging approach to literary biography. He uses every available source, both historical and literary, and essentially comes up with an adventure story where the poems form part of the subject’s development and admirably flesh out the biographer’s text.
A taut introduction to the life and poetry of influential eighth century Daoist poet Li Bai.
The author is a careful, deliberate stylist, which has made for finely understated novels and short stories. When writing nonfiction, though—especially regarding a subject like Li Bai, where accurate historical records are sparse—his writing becomes restrained, even wooden. Though Jin has accessed Chinese-language sources, his book is often frustratingly bereft of interpretive power or context. For example, the author barely examines the publishing industry (or word of mouth) that led to Li Bai’s rising stardom but fusses over picayune squabbles about his behavior at court. Jin’s fine translations of his subject’s poems are blessedly abundant, but he resists delivering deep interpretations of them.