Li Bai Books

This review is meant for those who may not read a lot of poetry or are still wondering about this book after reading other reviews.

Simply put, Li Po was so good, that he was even thought of as god like. He and Tu Fu are thought of as the greatest eastern poets that have ever lived, and being that they both lived around 700 AD that is very high praise. His words are moving and deeply stirring, and though he lived in such an isolated area so very long ago, his words still have great meaning now, no matter where your from or what your culture.

Filled with Zen and philosophy, this book is a great way of spending the day.

"The birds have vanished from the sky, and now the last clouds slip away. We sit alone, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains."

A great painter, that leaves you thinking. Get this book!

A good book that could have been better. It does not provide a Chinese text. Besides this, more extensive notes would have been useful. For example, in "Ch'ang-Kan Village Song," the wife says, "I'm not saying I'd go far to meet you, no further than Ch'ang-feng Sands." It would have been nice to know that Ch'ang-Kan was about two hundred miles downstream from Ch'ang-feng Sands. More serious is that note to the poem that states Ezra Pound "translated" this poem. Actually, Ezra Pound could not read Chinese when he wrote his version of the poem, but relied upon the writings of Ernest Fenollosa, who also could not read Chinese and relied upon Japanese scholars. Despite all this, the book does provide an enjoyable glimse of a Tang dynasty Dylan Thomas (at least as far as wine goes).

Li Po( a.k.a. Le Pih, Ly Pe, Li Tai-pe) brandishes a simple albeit powerful elegance with his gift of the written word.Bringing to mind the vast panoramic expanses and the soothing beauty of ancient China he will transport you to a splendid land of dreams.In his verse you will be reminded that mankind of all nationalities still relive the same emotions, the same issues over 1000 years later.Delicate and fragile as the cherry blossom in places, tainted and grotesque as a Foo dog in others. I don't own this particular copy. My copy was published in 1928 and translated by Shigeyoshi Obata. It also is more inclusive of Li Po's work. Reading from it always sends an electric thrill through my nerves. Truly one of the Earth's greatest poets ever to breath. "I saw the moonlight before my couch, And wondered if it were not the frost on the ground. I raised my head and looked out on the mountain moon; I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home."

Li Po fits perfectly into the modern class of poor sensitive vagabonds (Hamsun, Celine, Fante, Bukowski) and is sort of their Prince (because obviously the King is Catullus). His influence on just about everything is so obvious after you read these poems, and they are some of the most beautiful things ever put onto paper. Ezra Pound was a large fan and in fact translated some of his work. Anyone who buys this book should thank God they did, otherwise they are a sinner!!!

Keith Holyoak has done a great job in bringing Chinese poetry to the
fore of Western public. The translator deserves much credit for these
poems read as if they were originally written in English. He brings us
a big step closer to the music of an ancient and culturally distant
century. Some poems take a more metaphysical tone but never fail to be
touching and humane.

Very serene. Simple, but descriptive. Keith paints cozy scenes of Far East life. I cannot only picture it, I can feel, taste and smell these places.

Keith Holyoak brings the mastery of these ancient eastern poets to life in our western context. Like Shakespeare these poets works are timeless, themes of joy despair, awe of nature and friendship in the artists work ring true universally, crossing cultures and time lines. A rich historical account at the beginning of the volume is an added bonus.

Great introduction to low carb lifestyle. But, if you want to know why, beyond just loosing weight, you must look at : Good Calories, Bad Calories

I'm not sure about the health detriments, but this diet just didn't work for me. In order for it to work properly you need to watch your intake and not over-do it. This isn't a magic diet.

IF YOU FOLLOW HIS ADVISE YOU CAN LIVE A HEALTHY LIFE AND ACHIEVE GOOD EATING HABITS. YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO MAKE WISE DECISIONS IN EATING AND THE BOOK HELPS YOU DO THIS.

For those who have begun the Atkins low-carb way, this book helps you maintain a lifestyle of weight and blood sugar management.

I am going back to Atkins again. I was on this diet, dropping 30 pounds. My doctor said it was dangerous, to get off. After gaining back the weight,(plus a few pounds more) I tried: Weight Watchers and Calories & Fat counting. I have just maintained a 10 pound up & down for three years. After reading that the Adkins diet was most effective in taking weight off, I am going back. I ordered the book because I threw my old book away.

Simon Elegant's telling of the itinerant poet, Li Po's life, is a wonderfully told story. The larger than life Byronic overtones of Li Po's adventures serve to highlight the poetry which is liberally interspersed with his life's tale. The poetry, as a result, takes on a relevance missing in strict anthologies. While it is true that the story lacks some character development, this is not a book intended to be the last word on Li Po's life. However,"A Floating Life" is a terrific place to start one's own journey into the world of chinese poetry and literature.

Elegant stays fairly close to the historical facts, such facts as can be distinguished from the many legends, in telling the life of the great poet and Taoist Li Po. Li tells the story in this novel to a young boy, Wang Lung. The story is fun, and is the same sort of mixture of truth and myth that Li himself probably would have used had he really written an autobiography. There are numerous intriguing and believable details about the daily lives of people at various social levels, from the Imperial Court to poverty, in T'ang China.

The main weakenss in the book for me was that only Li Po really emerges as a character. The others who show up, either in the story of Li recounting his life while going into exile or in the story of Li's life, are poorly developed. Elegant works several poems by Li into the text, but I would have liked to see more.

It is worth noting that I have seen several translations of many of the poems here. I can't comment on the accuracy of Elegant's versions, but they are generally delightful, more enjoyable than other translations into English of the same poem.

I recommend it on the whole, for the charm of the story and of the poems translated in it, but I can't do so with great enthusiasm. A better novel with some similar material is 'Bridge of Birds' by Hughart.

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Reviewed by Randy Farnsworth, author of "A Stand Yet Taken".

As a longtime student of Chinese history, I was intrigued when I came across this book. Chinese history, particularly ancient China, has always fascinated me, and this novel didn't let me down. However, it started out a bit slow, and after 20 pages or so, I almost put it aside for something more interesting. The topic may not appear too exciting at first - the life story of a poet in eighth-century China - and it does have a slow start, but A Floating Life is actually a fun book and quite exciting at times.

Li Po is a real person, and has had a great influence even to this day. When my Chinese-born wife saw what I was reading, she immediately quoted some of Li Po's poetry and told me how he was always drunk. Simon Elegant takes some liberties with the story, but this is a novel after all, not a history book, so don't expect everything to be totally accurate.

The writing style is interesting: Simon Elegant uses present tense, third-person omniscience for the "present" time of the story, where Li Po is interacting with a young student who has agreed to write down the poet's story in return for instruction in the classic arts. Elegant then switches to past tense, first person limited viewpoint as Li Po relates his adventures. The reader is taken back and forth between the present and past and in a few places it's somewhat awkward, causing me to stop and figure out where in the timeline I was. But most of the transitions are smooth, and the present story fits in well with the past, especially as the two stories meet in the end.

As Elegant tries to convey a sense of setting and background, he describes with elegant (sorry :-) ) details the life, customs and culture of the time he is writing about. At first I thought he was really going overboard, just trying to show off his knowledge of the era with all the minute facts he could include, whether or not they added to the story. But the problem with my complaint is, they really do add to the story and hurl the reader back in time to Imperial China.

The book isn't perfect, though, as no book is, and if you're not into historical novels in general and Chinese history in particular, you may not find this too interesting. For example, Elegant spends a whole page or more just describing what the emperor served for dinner. I enjoyed reading that; it reminded me of some fancy banquets I attended while living in Asia. But some readers would just scan through that in an effort to get to the real story.

Also, I still don't see the need for any author to offend the reader with vulgar language. We all know that some people talk like that in real life, but we don't need to read it. It really adds absolutely nothing to the book and in reality, detracts from it. That said, however, I appreciate the fact that Elegant doesn't dwell too long on sex and violence. He lets us know that the world of Li Po was a violent place and briefly mentions some of the brutality, but doesn't disgust the reader with a play-by-play. Ditto on the sex scenes.

Lastly, I don't know if Elegant has downloaded a dictionary into his brain or what, but he sure uses some obscure language in places. I didn't mind that, but I had to keep a dictionary handy to look up some of the words.

Anything written from the Zhuangzi/Daoist point of view, from Lin Yutang's 'Moment in Peking' on down the sadly short list, shows an entirely different portrait of China than we are used to seeing. Amid the conformity, an eccentric; amid the tradition, a progressive; amid the acquiescence, a rebel; amid the herd, an individual. The tide never has, and probably never will, turn, but it is nice to know that there will always be those willing to swim joyously against it.

Li Po, or Li Bai as he is called in standard Mandarin, is one of those rare such characters in Chinese history, and Simon Elegant brings him convincingly to life, a man of flesh and blood and spirit.

I know little of Li Bai; here in China he is much memorialized but less remembered, so the tales in "Floating Life" are as much as I know about the mythology beyond the repute of the poems. I'm sure Elegant did his research, though, and it makes for an engaging tale.

The device of the acolyte/narrator is awkward at times, and the breaks away from Li Bai's voice cause the book's progression to stumble, but it does allow the tale to be told in first person and without overly rigorous chronology. Li Bai's tales, told through his perspective, witty and insightful, are what make the book.

And the book does justice to Li Bai's poetry and ethic. Reading it, one gets lost in the quiet moment, as if downing a bowl of warm Huangjiu in a boat on the West Lake at dusk. Simple, sublime. Li Bai did many things, and is enshrined in the catacombs of history, but what matters is that he knew how to be happy, how to live in the moment.

I read this book about six months ago. I return to it now because I have just been out on my balcony at night, decanting a bottle of bourbon. Quietly intoxicated, looking at the stars, naturally I think of Li Po.

Unfortunately, there is nothing awe-inspiring in Simon Elegant's capable, diverting book. Like another reviewer, I came to the work expecting something grand out of the subject. There is much to mine in the rich poetry of Li Po, and the poet just waits for some interpreter to bring him to the West as a flesh and bones human being. Ezra Pound did something toward that end in the several poems he wrote involving Li Po; Simon Elegant has chosen a different path in the same direction. But with Elegant I think its not enough. Too much adventure, not enough serious, ambitious literature--for me. Other readers will undoubtedly feel differently.

I read the book to try to approach Li Po himself, from an angle. I don't think it works that way. This is more like a good movie made about the poet...its watered down and concerned to tell its own amusing story.