Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.
Start by marking “The Wallet of Kai Lung (Kai Lung #1)” as Want to Read:
The Wallet of Kai Lung (Kai Lung #1)
Ernest Bramah (1868-1942) was an English author of considerable repute in his day. In total Bramah published 21 books and numerous short stories and features. His humorous works were ranked with Jerome K Jerome, and W. W. Jacobs; his detective stories with Conan Doyle; his politico-science fiction with H. G. Wells and his supernatural stories with Algernon Blackwood. Georg
...more
ebook, 252 pages
Published
May 15th 2002
by Wildside Press
(first published 1900)
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Reader Q&A
To ask other readers questions about
The Wallet of Kai Lung,
please sign up.
Be the first to ask a question about The Wallet of Kai Lung
This book is not yet featured on Listopia.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
(showing 1-30)
This shouldn't work. You shouldn't be able to make a collection of stories with forgettable plots, a vaguely defined setting, and non-existent characterization be interesting. Because to do that, you'd have to make it compelling purely on the level of the individual sentence, and that is a ridiculous goal.
Ernest Bramah accomplishes that goal, and it is a joy to watch him do it.
Ernest Bramah accomplishes that goal, and it is a joy to watch him do it.
Have to give up on this one after just a few pages. I liked the idea of the book more than the way the book was written.
I found nice and quite cheap copies of all the Kai lung books at a second hand book shop last month. As someone whose interested in all things Chinese, and western interpretations of China, I thought I had to get them all. This book was originally written in 1900 and for it's time is quite remarkable. It is totally the opposite of the Sax Rohmer books. Here while often humourous the author seems to genuienly like Chinese culture. Currently it's debated if he ever went to China before writing the
...more
I found nice and quite cheap copies of all the Kai lung books at a second hand book shop last month. As someone whose interested in all things Chinese, and western interpretations of China, I thought I had to get them all. This book was originally written in 1900 and for it's time is quite remarkable. It is totally the opposite of the Sax Rohmer books. Here while often humourous the author seems to genuienly like Chinese culture. Currently it's debated if he ever went to China before writing the
...more
Apr 12, 2011
Matthew Gatheringwater
rated it
liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
bedside-books,
short-fiction
Like a fortune cookie, this book has a vaguely Far Eastern flavor, but its origins are in the West. Readers seeking authenticity should look elsewhere. Before you go, however, please consider that inauthenticity has not detracted from the lasting popularity of the fortune cookie...or Bramah's stories set in an imagined China.
The experience of reading these loosely interrelated stories was a bit like reading Candide, Gulliver's Travels, or some other picaresque satire, but Bramah's satire is less ...more
The experience of reading these loosely interrelated stories was a bit like reading Candide, Gulliver's Travels, or some other picaresque satire, but Bramah's satire is less ...more
A sequence of short stories which are meant to seem as if translated from Japanese. Most of the tales focus on the poor but noble triumphing over the rich but corrupt. The later tales seem to hold a bit more humour than the earlier stuff and i really felt it improved as it went. I only read part of this and listened to the rest from Libravox.
Heres a little sample of the kind of writing your in for: 'A sedan-chair! A sedan-chair! This person will unhesitatingly exchange his entire and well-regula ...more
Heres a little sample of the kind of writing your in for: 'A sedan-chair! A sedan-chair! This person will unhesitatingly exchange his entire and well-regula ...more
Jul 09, 2013
Valerie
added it
I first had a go at the Kai Lung books because I liked their cover designs on my parents' bookshelves. I wasn't impressed. Then I got to reading Dorothy L Sayers' works, and I noted that she WAS very impressed. Impressed enough to quote from them repeatedly. So I thought I must have missed something, and went back.
Nope. I still wasn't impressed. I slogged my way through them, in case they improved within. Still nothing. I could see this sort of thing done well. I think of Lem's Cyberiad, for ex ...more
Nope. I still wasn't impressed. I slogged my way through them, in case they improved within. Still nothing. I could see this sort of thing done well. I think of Lem's Cyberiad, for ex ...more
One reads this for the language on display by Bramah: the absurd sustained Latinate circumlocutions which forever perendinate and cunctate on expressing their simple sense. As far as that goes, it's quite an interesting exercise and the source of a number of parodic versions of China/Japan, I suspect. I am not sure how many people are up to a entire sustained anthology of this, though: the stories are relatively flimsy and one can drown in the prose while losing track utterly of the plot and per
...more
I picked this up a long time ago and finally got around to reading it recently, after seeing a recommendation of it from Charles Vess in "Rags and Bones". (Actually the recommendation was for " Kai Lung's Golden Hours", but I had this one so I thought I'd read it instead.) And...it was OK. Really a slog to get through. A bit of Bramah's faux-Chinese writing style goes a LONG way, and 252 pages of it felt like 500. I know some people really speak highly of the Kai Lung stories. I don't see it mys
...more
I am both a confirmed Sinophile and a rabid lexiphanicist (i.e., I take unholy glee in big words) but I found this book to be a disappointment. Bramah does an incredible send-up of genteel Edwardian perceptions of Old Cathay, but a parody of a counterfeit just doesn't float my boat. Yes, Bramah's depiction of the florid circumlocutions of Chinese courtesy is nothing short of brilliant. But after the first 30 pages of florid circumlocutions I found them to be maddeningly in the way of the flow of
...more
This one defeated me; 30% and I jumped ship. The prose proved to be too dense, getting in the way of the story. This may be just because of the time in which it was written, however I have happily read Conan Doyle, who was a contempory of the author, so I don't think that is a complete excuse. Having said that, the tales are certainly imaginative and evoke an interesting vision of China (although quite how accurate a vision is another matter).
So, two stars because it couldn't keep me interested ...more
So, two stars because it couldn't keep me interested ...more
This was one of my the favourite books of my father's family in the 1920's and 30's. So I'm ashamed to say that I found it really hard to follow, and though it was very readable I have little clue what it was about....thus does family intelligence etiolate over the generations...so I am going to give it another go, slowly and carefully, and maybe take notes......
The world needs more characters who must maintain their reputations for keen and polished sentences. And who doesn't love a character who's thrown into a class of circumstances greatly differing from anything which he had ever sought?
I found this on Project Gutenberg and read it because Peter Wimsey loved it. It's definitely amusing, and surprisingly free of racism for it's time period. I find that a little goes a long way though, and I would definitely take this one story at a time.
I found this a bit long winded and after the first story of the Transmutation of Ling. Not my thing.
Interesting insight into the culture he describes, but at time the language is too cumbersome. English was not meant to be written and read in that fashion for more than a few lines...
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
Bramah was a reclusive soul, who shared few details of his private life with his reading public. His full name was Ernest Bramah Smith. It is known that he dropped out of Manchester Grammar School at the age of 16, after displaying poor aptitude as a student and thereafter went into farming, and began writing vignettes for the local newspaper. Bramah's father was a wealthy man who rose from factor
...more
More about Ernest Bramah...
Other Books in the Series
Kai Lung
(6 books)
Share This Book
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
“It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops.”
—
3 likes
“The inimitable stories of Tong-King never have any real ending, and this one, being in his most elevated style, has even less end than most of them. But the whole narrative is permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, and the two characters are both of noble birth.”
—
2 likes
More quotes…
