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Book Description:
The form of "Love in a Fallen City" is that of a novelette (a short novel.) The story takes place first in Shanghai, then Hong Kong. At first glimpse it looks like a story of the heroine Liusu's struggles with her family ties, but when story moves to her travel to Hong Kong with the Hsu family to meet Liuyuan again, the reader realizes it's a love story. Like many of Eileen Chang's stories, this love story includes some sort of love triangle.
The story is set in the year 1941 when the Japanese attacked and then occupied Hong Kong. There are both Western and traditional Chinese influences in the story. The Western influence appears in the form of Liuyuan, while the traditional Chinese influence is symbolized by Liusu. It is also shown through her family and their desire to marry all their daughters off. The balance between mixing two cultures allows many things to happen in the story that would not happen in other more traditional short stories.
中文简介：
《倾城之恋》是写一对精明过份的男女是如何在爱情上锱珠必较，功利全局，最后却因香港的沦陷而成全了那份世故的婚姻。这是一部香港式的“传奇”故事，却深刻地反映出乱世中的人情全然没有些许纯真，使人性得到稳定和规范的竟是险而又险的“传奇”力量，这部小说对人性冷漠的描写令人震慑，仿佛出自一个饱经沧桑的大家之手，其艺术之圆熟，语言之精美堪称中国现代爱情小说中的经典之作。
About Author:
Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life.
Written when she was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature.
张爱玲(1920.9.3-1995.9.8)原名张煐。原籍河北丰润，生于上海。童年在北京、天津度过，1929年迁回上海。1930改名张爱玲。她的主要作品有小说集《传奇》和散文集《流言》，随后，又写有中篇小说《小艾》、长篇小说《十八春》、《秧歌》、《赤地之恋》、《怨女》和评论集《红楼梦魇》等。
她的创作大多取材于上海、香港的上层社会，社会内容不够宽广，却开拓了现代文学的题材领域。这些作品，既以中国古典小说为根柢，又突出运用了西方现代派心理描写技巧，并将两者融合于一体，形成颇具特色的个人风格。
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