Swallowing Clouds

by Lillian Ng

In a vivid "past life" in Shanghai in the summer of 1918, Syn was drowned in a pig's basket for committing adultery. Now in her present life in 1985, a blind soothsayer warns her that she will never... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0880016442
• ISBN13: 9780880016445
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

an absorbing seduction

as absorbing as is Lillian Ng's narrative with its past lives, spiritual journeys and cultural comparisons, Swallowing Clouds is dominated by sex... Raw, manipulative, seductiion and erotic sex. It concerns Syn who in a past life in ancient China was drowned for committing adultery. In this life, Syn finds herself stranded in Sydney and unable to safely return to China because of the crackdown on students and dissidents after the Tiananmen Square massacre. She soon begins a torrid affair with Zhu, the local butcher, and for a while the relationship serves as a panacea for Syn's fantasies and desires, but gradually she finds her happiness waning, her identity disappearing and her life consumed. Restoring all these three is the crux of Ng's story and in telling it she offers an evocative portrait of Chinese history and modern Chinese life in Australia. Stuck between two cultures, Syn's struggle is timely, but also quite original, the ultimate reward for the reader being an arousing novel about the need to be needed, the desire for happiness and fulfilment and the importance of indivuality and respect.