A Gentle Night

A Gentle Night is one of Sanmao's signature essay collections. It gathers pieces written after she and her husband José left the Sahara Desert and moved to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic, and it chiefly records the odd encounters, whimsical thoughts, and ordinary human warmth of island life. In its pages she goes beachcombing with a Swiss primary-school teacher, becomes fast friends with a wandering young Japanese man, pays respects at a cemetery to a fellow countryman from her homeland whom she never met, and endures the ordeal of demanding José's unpaid wages in the scorching heat of West Africa. The book holds both longing for home and those she has lost, and lament for the hardships of life. Compared with the exuberance of Stories of the Sahara, its prose is gentler and more subdued, drawing out the bonds between people from the small, plain stuff of daily life, and writing of freedom, dreams, life, art, and love. Sanmao admits in these pages that her writing "has no purpose at all"; she simply sets down her sincere heart freely. After seeing the warmth and coldness of human nature on every side, what she writes remains a tender regard and earnest care for the wide world, and for that reason the book is regarded as her most lifelike work and the one that puts readers most at ease.