Summer reads

"Peony in Love"
By Lisa See
Random House, $23.95

If you prefer your romance with historical, international and supernatural flair, reach for Lisa See's "Peony in Love." See, the author of 2005's widely acclaimed "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," takes readers to 17th century China, in uproar after the cataclysmic end of the Ming dynasty.

See's subjects are the so-called lovesick maidens, wealthy young women who became consumed by the popular opera "The Peony Pavilion." The opera, which is still performed today, told the story of a 16-year-old woman who wrestled control of her own destiny by starving herself and finding love after death. It inspired imitation among its rabid young fans, eager to take control of their own romantic and literary lives in a culture that robbed them of any independence or authority.

See bases her story on three real lovesick ladies, Tan Ze, Qian Yi and Chen Tong. The book is loaded with fascinating detail about 17th century customs, superstitions, landscape and folklore. From the infected and broken-boned pain of foot binding to the maggoty remains of food offered to unhappy spirits by wealthy families, "Peony in Love" evokes the unpleasant realities of post-Ming-dynasty China even as it chronicles a lush and ethereal love story.

From the solid grounding in history, See's story takes flight into fantasy. Chen Tong, the 15-year-old would-be scholar whose scandalous and illicit (though squeaky clean by today's standards) encounter with a male poet sets the book in motion, is soon a lovesick lass, dead one-third of the way into the story. She becomes a "Hungry Ghost," a shade who cannot take her rightful place among her family's revered "ancestors" because some burial rites have been carelessly ignored. And so she settles her spirit self into her beloved poet's home and insinuates herself into his next two marriages, using the delay in straightening out her postmortem paperwork to coach his wives on everything from oral sex to literary criticism.

With "Peony in Love," See delivers a powerful meditation on the place of women and their voices in a society that has little use for either. One character, certain of impending death, scrawls anonymous lines of poetry on a wall; another allows her husband to take credit for her scholarship; several characters see their work burned, or burn it themselves in acts of self-loathing and humiliation.

A few women succeed, in life or after death, in going public: writing and publishing under their own names, leaving the world with volumes like Tan Ze, Qian Yi and Chen Tong's commentary on "The Peony Pavilion," a text that was celebrated and then reviled, but from which, 200 years later, See found the inspiration for her own work.

-- Rebecca Traister

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