A Companion to The Story of the Stone (hereafter Companion) is exactly what it says it is—a chapter-by-chapter companion for the reader or rereader of the eighteenth-century novel also known as Dream of the Red Chamber. Pai Hsien-yung, who is perhaps best known as a writer of fiction, has written important works in Chinese on the novel; this work is a distillation of Pai's earlier work in Chinese on the novel and is a convenient introduction to anglophone readers of Pai's scholarship. Susan Chan Egan is a distinguished scholar and translator.
The Companion proceeds methodically through the novel. The authors provide very brief summaries of each chapter of the novel, followed by a commentary that, though always terse, is often illuminating even to those who have read the novel many times. The commentary unfolds chapter by chapter in what seems to be a nod to Chinese traditions of...
