I read the Chinese version of this book for several years, I am quite sure it's the best chinese book i have ever read.

Limited Views could be seen as an anachronistic (but no less brilliant) work of Classical Chinese philology, but as another reviewer has already remarked, it is startlingly modern, deconstructionist, and even tips its hat to the melee of cultural studies. For those who lament the death of philology in the modern American university, Qian proves that, at least in its Chinese form, philological studies is still firmly at the centre of the humanities and liberal arts. Qian's extraordinary command of the languages and literatures of six or seven literary traditions should leave modern cross-cultural studies in tears of shame. But beyond that, it is Qian's familiarity with the scholarship and the intellectual history of those traditions that is most breathtaking. For a scholar emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to pen such a work is a fete none can match. This isn't to say that Limited Views is necessarily a model for reconstructing a philology, but what Qian has achieved is something that the modern division of disciplines in the humanities can never achieve while still divided. And the value of Qian's work is hard to deny.

Like the previous reviewer, I'm only familiar with the original version of this work, which is something like 2000 pps, written in a classical Chinese utterly incomprehensible to your ordinary Chinese college graduate. Qian carried out what Benjamin, dying young, failed to complete, a book not written, but quoted. That is, at least 90% of this immense book is made up of quotes, in Latin, Italian, German, French, English, and of course Chinese. This sort of undertaking requres imagination as well as learning, not to say a real appetite for reading practically anything. By the way, Qian wrote one of the few good Chinese novels of this century, and pretty good traditional verse.