THE CRIPPLED TREE

by Han Suyin ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Curiously divided between history and imagination, this autobiographical book covers the first fifteen years of its author's life, and three generations of Chinese political, social and family history, in an attempt to ""find through an old world made explicit a completion of the new."" On one level it is the story of the child Rosalie Yentung, growing up in Peking and along the railways her engineer father built in Szechuan province, torn between love and hatred for her furious, voluble Belgian mother, love and pity for her silenced, poetic Chinese father, the beauty and brutality of the life around her, the pressure of living between irreconcilable contradictions in a China where to be Chinese was to be a beggar, to be European was to be a ""foreign devil."" In one sense The Crippled Tree is the violent, isolated, brilliant child who became Han Suyin. In another sense, it is China itself, twisted by conflicts, yet surviving. Han Suyin has largely accepted the 1949 revolution as Liberation. Yet her characters, ""not fictional"" though they are, become interesting insofar as they awaken into the reality of imaginative life, rather than submitting the nightmare of history to Marxist analysis and redemption. And her events become significant in terms of their influence on individual lives rather than their effectiveness as illustrations of the historical processes. Exhaustive, sometimes exhaustingly inclusive, yet fascinating, if sometimes overblown, as a re-creation.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1965

Categories: NONFICTION