活着之上

At a Chinese university, those who thrive are the clever operators who know how to use every connection and chance for fame and gain. The narrator, the historian Nie Zhiyuan, belongs to another kind of scholar: he has a conscience and ambitions of his own, yet must survive in the same world and often gives way to it. Through his years in academia he holds on to a private model, Cao Xueqin, who wrote Dream of the Red Chamber in hardship without bowing to the world, and to a flicker of the independence that Chinese scholars once prized.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Satire (assigned by AI)

Set in

China

First published

2014 by Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House

Author's age

57 when first published

ISBN

9787540470371 (original)