CLASSIC CHINESE SHORT STORIES, VOL. 1
By Sandy Bauers - March 29, 2003
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Charlton Griffin has always liked to read aloud. He can still recall the early days of his marriage, when he worked as a winemaker's apprentice all day and then read to his wife at night.
They lived in Germany at the time, and the setting couldn't have been better – the Rhine, swans in the moat of a nearby castle, and Dickens or the Brönte sisters after dinner.
He felt short stories languished in the shadow of longer fiction, and now that he has his own audio company, he has made it his mission to rescue the genre from neglect.
Pair that with a love of faraway lands, and one could almost say Griffin, the owner, engineer, material selector and narrator for Audio Connoisseur, has embarked on a worldwide short-story tour.
He started with Chekhov, Maugham, de Maupassant and others like them. Then, he started offering recordings of short stories from particular countries. He did the United States, Russia, Germany and Ireland.
His latest is from China, a collection of seven unabridged tales from the sixth century to the 20th. Griffin's plan was "to represent as many great Chinese authors as I could fit into my selection," but most of us will just have to take that on faith. Feng Meng-long and P'u Sung-ling aren't exactly household names in this country.
Finding good translations, he said, was a project in itself, and he read for months before narrowing his selection.
He could have just called a professor of Chinese literature at an American university, but one admires the dedication with which he threw himself into the project and made it a personal selection.
The stories are lovely. They have moral endings or emphasize the impossibility of escaping one's fate. Many are steeped in tradition. If someone comes to your house, even if it's an enemy and you've just kidnapped his wife, you must extend hospitality by giving him a cup of tea, and you have to treat one another with courtesy and honor.
Griffin reads in a deep, rich voice that is easy to listen to. He sounds like a natural at narration to begin with, and those years of practice reading to his wife, and then a later career as a voice-over artist, could only have improved his technique.
In fact, Griffin is a bit behind schedule on his own company's recordings because other audiobook companies have sought him out to read for them.
For many of the Chinese stories, he adopts an aristocratic, vaguely British accent that suits the often-formal tone. The lower class characters - a cooper, who makes wooden casks, for instance - have vaguely Cockney accents.
It works. The characters don't have to have Chinese accents for listeners to know where they are. Where else do people have prize canaries or carve exquisite figures in jade?
And it's refreshing to nibble on short stories instead of wading into a 20-hour novel.
Griffin also includes Chinese music between - or, when it works, during - the stories.
All in all, quite a nice trip, thanks.
