In writing this review, I realized how rare it is for me to delve into historical fiction. Of all the books that I’ve read, I could only pull out of my memory Shohei Ooka’s Fires on the Plain as being in the “historical fiction” genre. That story was set in a Philippine jungle during WWII—actual historical events. But that novel’s characters were fictional Japanese soldiers and Filipino guerillas. That’s as far as I’ve ever gone in the historical fiction genre. So until I’ve read Empress, I have never before encountered a novel that featured actual historical figures as its characters. As a work of fiction, the novel reimagines the life and reign of China’s only woman Emperor, Wu Zetian, who ruled in the middle of the Tang dynasty by founding her own Zhou dynasty. As advertised, it’s a biographical novel—if it weren’t fiction, Empress could just as well work as a biography of Empress Wu, bolstered by an abundance of detail describing the ceremonies, rituals, parades, clothing, architecture, and lifestyle of Tang dynasty China—that’s why the novel at times reads like a history book.

The writing is artful, exquisite poetic prose. Shan Sa originally wrote the novel in French and I found Adriana Hunter’s English translation was beautifully and colorfully executed. Thanks to the narrative voice employed by the author, I felt like I could have been reading an actual memoir written by Empress Wu herself. Shan Sa uses the Empress’s own perspective, which reaches into spiritual levels, as seen in the novel’s opening where she narrates her own birth. The reader is then taken on a fascinating journey through the ups and downs of the Empress’s life amidst the milieu of Imperial China.

Spoiler

The novel shines as it reaches its apogee with Empress Wu’s founding of her own dynasty and maintains its luster through its depiction of the Empress’s late-life struggles: Becoming torn in choosing an heir to her throne, as well as coming to terms with her own mortality, told in the Empress’s voice mixed with the denial, pain, and melancholy of a once glorious ruler confronting the sunset of her reign.

Shan Sa has written a highly ambitious novel and I admire the depth of the research she must have done to pull this off. Infusing fiction into actual historical events, especially a history as rich as China’s, is a daunting task and Empress definitely didn’t disappoint.

Kind of difficult to get through - slow and confusing (with the plethora of background characters). The epilogue was great though.

One of my favorite Chinese Dynesty novels!!

I've a penchant for literature written with an eye on the grander scale of things. Most probably it comes with my preoccupation with critiquing the canon, albeit through far less flimsy bases than prose and universality and all that invisible-hand jazz. In return for paying attention to fields that are not required for the common range of English (history, politics, decolonization, gender dichotomy, all that fun stuff people like to pretend are subsidiary instead of the power generators of unquestioned classical status), I get a continuum. An angry, muddled, and heckling continuum, by way of the present forever desiring to never pick apart the past, but knowledge is power. Of course, absolute power corrupts absolutely, but you can complain about my biases when white men make up less than ten percent of the population of various prizes, as befits their portion of the demographic. If you actually want to achieve something, your target is not me.

In the vein of [b:Imperial Woman|93521|Imperial Woman|Pearl S. Buck|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347325410s/93521.jpg|1610546] and [b:Memoirs of Hadrian|12172|Memoirs of Hadrian|Marguerite Yourcenar|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1416448158s/12172.jpg|1064574] we have a work that is closer than either in terms of the physiognomy of author and authored. The prose is to my taste, the world is to my wonder, and the life lived in close sensory detail and alienated moral grounds utterly befits the saying that the past is a foreign country. Up until the end point of the narrative, we reside in the head of one who survives via cunning, fertility, lust, health, strategy, bloodthirstiness, and every recourse of a dynastic body and soul. One runs, and builds, and improves, and kills, until finally immortality begs the question of the empire one has built: what tools will you leave behind once you are dead? What have you left to the rulers, what have you left to the populace, and how will the latter mourn when the former have thrown each other to the wolves.

Beware: this is is historical fiction of the Chinese variety whose subject is a woman of infamous degree. Those who do not indulge in historical fact with great pleasure, you may be bored by the ritual regulation and political machination and all that comes with the narrative that rules an
empire. Those who indulge to a great degree, you may be miffed by a smoothing here, a sentimentalizing there, for massacres and incest there was to a great degree. Bear in mind, however, that each and every fact has been touched with gynephobic malice. If you want a culprit for nonfictional debacles, there're your men.

Outside of that, there is the matter of a sexuality touching on a far broader space of field than the young man and the young woman, lesbian pedophilia and female-dominated gerontophilia being two of the more sensational breeds of intercourse. Even farther, there is the realpolitik of the first millennium CE which put both my favorite families, the Tudors and the Borgias, to shame. To shift to more usual literary matters, carrying all that across is the prose. For those of the French linguistic persuasion, the original text is available. While curious as to how that would go, I am satisfied enough with my Anglo transfiguration to pass on making an effort.

Finally, there is the ending, one of those out of body frames that attempts to draw a holism out of a past power speaking to an impermanent present. Enamored with contextual awareness that I am, the last bit bumped this up that last half star. Those of the more objective temperament: you're missing out.

Lush and very poetical, I could not take it in one reading. I stopped halfway through for a few months! But the beginning meets the ending, and may even surpass it, even though it is a historical fiction novel, it is very believable, and I wish I had known her, especially toward the end of her life. I could not connect with her too well, until she reached her summit and began her decline. She was human and was beautiful. This drama may seem tedious at times, (I skipped the multi-page parade description) and was ravished with the details in a moment between months within a paragraph.

I had a difficult time rating this one because some chapters I felt could be five stars, while others could be two.

The writing was really overblown and tedious (a whole chapter full of purple prose on the miracle of her birth? Really?), and I really struggled to finish. Usually I have a little crisis about giving books away after I finish them, but this one went straight to Bookmooch without a second thought. Really disappointing.

3.5 stars. Moody and beautiful, actually felt like it was written by the empress at a lush time in China's history. I got lost a little by the hundreds of characters, but was convinced and intrigued by Heavenlight.