Reading Journey to the West and noticing the subtleties.
“No, that’s not what I said at all!” the fat monk exclaimed.
We were sitting in the shade of a hidden grotto, weird-shaped rocks from Lake Taihu surrounding us. We fanned ourselves with big black fans. The sun had passed its peak, but the air was muggy and still. The cicadas were as loud as chainsaws.
It really was too hot to argue, but I just couldn’t let it go. Over the previous two weeks I had been listening to a recording of Xi You Ji, the Journey to the West or, as the kids called it, Monkey. The recording was by a traditional storyteller and was quite exciting. At the same time I had been following along in the novel.
The fat monk had said that the novel was full of inconsistencies, and I said that I did not think it was sloppily written at all, quite the contrary, I thought the novel was very carefully constructed.
“The inconsistencies are quite deliberate,” he said with a sniff.
The Fat Monk 