I enjoyed Empress because it plunged me into another world in which Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor, narrates her life during the Tang dynasty. After the election results on Wednesday, I was in a state of shock; anxious and appalled, I couldn’t concentrate on reading a novel for days. When I finally picked up Empress on Saturday I was drawn into a far-away, detailed setting and was able to forget real life for a while, and for that I’m grateful.

I preferred the beginning of the book over the middle and end. Author Shan Sa does a better job of giving readers an interior view of young Wu Zetian’s yearning and doubts from birth to adolescence up to her first years as a concubine in the royal palace. It’s once Wu Zetian matures and attains power that Sa distances us from the protagonist. Exposition becomes the main content of the novel; major events and happenings, years even, are glossed over within the span of a few sentences. The cost of breadth is depth; in attempting to tell the story of eighty years of a profuse life situated within a profuse epoch of Chinese history, Sa resorts to summary. It is a well-written, pretty summary, lush with ornamental details of clothes, ceremonies, characters, and scenery of 7th century China. Among this lavishness is a disappointing paucity of actual scenes, dialogue, and interior emotion you expect in a first-person narrative.

Of course, there are reasons for this distance. Wu Zetian becomes increasingly calculating, detached, and merciless in order to consolidate and maintain her power. She is inaccessible and unassailable once she attains the office of emperor both to the people around her, and the readers of the book. I can understand that Sa wants to portray that Wu Zetian’s ascent translated into distance and disconnect. I can also understand that Sa wants to present Wu Zetian as narrating even after death and looking back on 80 years of life; very probably, something like breadth achieved through summary but a sparsity of specific scenes or emotions is what you would get if asking an old lady to tell her life story. However, in a novel, it’s an unsatisfying structure that engenders pacing problems. At 350 pages, this book would have been better balanced and paced if it focused on only a few key years of Wu Zetian’s life. Alternatively, if it was about three times as long, if attempting to tackle her whole life. I mean, I don’t usually advocate for a longer book, but the life story of a woman emperor who rose from basically nothing during China’s golden era to ultimate power is actually something that justifies a thousand page novel.

The opulence of Shan Sa’s prose surprised me at first. I started Empress erroneously thinking I was reading a translation of a Chinese novel. This kind of lushness—a surrender to the extravagance of language—is not something I’d yet encountered in Chinese literature, translated or not, and I was wondering if it was time to reevaluate my opinion of Chinese literature and Chinese to English translations. But as it turns out, Sa actually wrote this book in French. When I realized that, everything clicked into place, and I understood why this book didn’t feel like other Chinese literature I’d read before. It explained the peculiar, displaced feeling I had when I tried to imagine the original Chinese that lay beyond the English rendering. At the core of this book's prose is an energy that draws more from a French aesthetic than a Chinese one.

An author who chooses their second language over their mother tongue is an enigma to me. I can’t imagine myself ever having the courage or resolve to make that leap. English is my comfort, my refuge. I stumble in my second languages; I feel they will always reject me on some level, for my clumsiness. I have to wonder what pushes any author to embrace the new and foreign over the familiar and forgiving when mastery of a language is a writer’s foundation. It’s one thing growing up learning other languages, like Nabokov or Kafka, and ultimately selecting one language over the other to write in; it’s entirely something else learning a foreign language as an adult and choosing it over your native one. I have to wonder what impels such a radical decision. It’s curious that the only other author I’ve read that made this same choice, Ha Jin, is also Chinese. I think Jin’s choice might have been more for political reasons; Sa says she saw her future in French.

I suppose I can’t blame the translator for the inconsistency of Chinese proper names and places, the other criticism I have of this book. It’s probably something carried over from Sa’s original inconsistency, sometimes even within the same sentence or paragraph. It felt thoroughly disorderly to me. This book solidified my dislike of the practice of literally translating Chinese names; it’s inelegant and panders to a western audience. For cities, instead of writing Chang’an, Sa translates it literally to “Long Peace”; but doesn’t translate other cities, like Luoyang, i.e. “Northern bank of the Luo River,” probably because that doesn’t sound as exotic. She does this with character names as well. Since there are already footnotes/notes in the book, I think a much better solution would be to keep the pinyin within the narration and explain the meaning, if any, of the name where it doesn’t obtrude as much; she does this for Wu Zetian’s surname Wu, explaining it means “warrior” in the endnotes, but then goes ahead and translates names like “Sheep,” “Pure Intelligence,” and “Future,” but also has “Shen Nan Qiu,” and Empress Wang without explaining their meanings in Chinese anywhere.

But overall, Empress is a solid book and I’d like to read more by Shan Sa sometime. Moreover, I think reading more historical fiction not only set in places other than the US/Western Europe but also translated from other languages is something I need to prioritize.

YASSS QUEEN

I wanted to love this book, I really did. But it was just too difficult to follow. I think that is due to the fact that this is based on a much studied actual historical figure, so many of then descriptions of ceremonies and official writings of the Empress Wu were pulled out of actual historical documents, but did little to move the narrative forward. It was like when I can across a passage about this amazing event, or the details of the palaces described, it just stopped, and I couldn't place the characters that I was already having trouble following into the description.

This book was both good and not so good. Loved reading about the life of Empress Wu from “her” perspective but wasn’t a big fan of all the historical detail, although I can appreciate the amount of research that went into this book.

Well written, but the author tends to over indulge in details for some of the ceremonies. (I don't really need to know how many of each instruments were being played. Every.Single.Time.)