SUMMER OF BETRAYAL

Summer Of Betrayal ($21.00; Jun. 1997; 208 pp.; 0-374-27175-5): First published in Taiwan in 1992, this impassioned novel describes the emotional life of a young woman poet in the wake of the 1989 massacre of dissident students in Tiananmen Square. Lin Ying finds neither sexual satisfaction nor intellectual stimulation in relationships with variously disappointing men—only a cryptic kind of orgiastic fulfillment following an unconvincingly willful shedding of inhibitions. Hong Ying has interesting things to say about the submission of art to political considerations in contemporary China, and the poems attributed to her protagonist are often lovely. But the novel is clogged with highly charged melodramatic language (as translated), and the tedious amorality and apostrophizing of the bohemian culture Lin Ying moves through can make you feel as if you're reading Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans in Chinese.