My Last Empress by Da Chen [Book Review]

Da Chen’s My Last Empress is a mixture of fable and reality, viewed through the imperfect perception of its characters rather than the crisp clear view of an omniscient narrator. While not perhaps the “hallucinatory realism” lauded by the Nobel Committee in their recent awarding of the Nobel Prize to Da Chen’s compatriot Mo Yan, the story events, firmly set in reality, are enveloped in a mystical ethos that ultimately permeates the entire novel.

A short way to describe the plot of The Last Empress is “Lolita in the Forbidden City”. Like Nabokov’s Humbert, the main character Samuel Pickens (who is actually a real historical figure) finds love at a young age, only to have his lover die a tragically early death. Pickens lives a listless life until he escapes his home for foreign shores: Pickens takes the opportunity to visit the city of Beijing to tutor the young Emperor. However, once he arrives in the Imperial City, he meets the Emperor’s favorite empress (who, unlike Lolita, is over eighteen), who immediately reminds Pickens of his long-dead love.

This is an excerpt from a review of My Last Empress by Da Chen, originally published in the Asian Review of Books on January 4th, 2013. The full review can be accessed here.