Recommendations
Books Like Dream of the Red Chamber (Hóng Lóu Mèng) by Cao Xueqin
Classical Chinese literature, aristocratic family sagas, and novels of beauty and decline
If Dream of the Red Chamber moved you with the Jia family's Grand Prospect Garden world of poetry, beauty, and youth being inexorably dismantled, and with the love triangle between Baoyu, Daiyu, and Baochai, these eight works share its preoccupation with the beautiful world that cannot survive, and its use of family decline as a meditation on time.
- 1Buy on Amazon
Outlaws of the Marsh
by Shi Nai'an
Another of the Four Great Classical Novels — where Dream of the Red Chamber is lyrical and aristocratic, Outlaws of the Marsh is popular and heroic; together they span the range of classical Chinese fiction.
- 2
Buy on AmazonJourney to the West
by Wu Cheng'en
The third of the Four Great Classical Novels — the Monkey King's pilgrimage to India; the fantastical counterpart to Red Chamber's psychological realism; essential for understanding the range of classical Chinese narrative.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Tale of Genji
by Murasaki Shikibu
The Japanese equivalent of Dream of the Red Chamber — another aristocratic court world of beauty, love, and decline, written seven centuries earlier; both are the supreme literary achievements of their civilizations.
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The Scholars (Rulin Waishi)
by Wu Jingzi
The great contemporary satirical novel of the Confucian examination system — Wu Jingzi's dark comedy of scholars chasing examination success is the satirical counterpart to Red Chamber's elegy for the aristocratic world.
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Buy on AmazonIn Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
The Western novel most often compared to Dream of the Red Chamber — both are vast meditations on time, memory, and the beautiful world that cannot be held; both were begun as autobiographical works and transformed into philosophical masterpieces.
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Buy on AmazonBuddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
The great Western family-decline novel — four generations of a Lübeck merchant family as commercial vigor gives way to artistic sensitivity and failure; the European version of the Red Chamber's dynastic decline.
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Buy on AmazonRaise the Red Lantern
by Su Tong
Su Tong's novella (1990) — a young woman married into a feudal household of concubines; the film by Zhang Yimou made it famous; the most direct contemporary descendant of Red Chamber's world of women enclosed in an aristocratic household.
- 8Buy on Amazon
Kokoro
by Natsume Sōseki
The Japanese novel of generational transition and guilt — Sensei's hidden guilt and the narrator's loyalty give Sōseki's world of early twentieth-century Japan the same weight that Red Chamber gives its eighteenth-century China.
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