A curiosity at best.
Anthology of Chinese short-shorts ranges from exotic to downright weird.
Apparently, short-short stories (under a thousand words) have taken China, Taiwan and Hong Kong by storm. Whence this collection representing what the editors’ introduction cites as a global phenomenon. In China, short-shorts are not merely the province of creative-writing programs or literary contests, but have a mass readership in magazines and newspapers. This anthology attempts to bill as literature what are essentially anecdotes à la Paul Harvey. Whether the culture barriers are too opaque, the translation issues too thorny or self-censorship too rampant, the most avid reader of international literature may find these stories vague and puzzling. Division into 15 sections with seemingly arbitrary theme headings, e.g. Governance, Controversy and yes, Weirdness, imposes no real coherence. A few of the pieces are gently ironic, while many amble aimlessly—the majority of these 91 tales are more accurately characterized as sketches. In “Losing the Feet,” a shoe clerk is drawn to a customer with smelly feet, and when she disappears, his own feet start to smell. “The Beat” involves a son’s gift of a metronome—delayed by a garrulous old geezer—to a mother who, in retirement, is pursuing her lifelong dream of learning the piano. “A Cup of Tea” captures a petty bureaucrat’s anguish over not offering tea to a non-tea-drinking superior, and then over apologizing for his lapse. Readers may not grasp the outcome of certain stories (“A Capable Man Can’t Handle a Small Case,” “Cat”). Some smack of horror (“Flies,” “Chimney Smoke”). Occasionally, entries succeed by rendering a socioeconomic phenomenon concrete: the food chain of trash trucks and trash-pickers, in “The Cycle”; or by illustrating a peculiar prejudice: a male obstetrician risks offending by delivering babies and pays with his life for his skill (“Small-Hands Chen”). Other stories echo Western fables (“The Crow and the Fox”) or pop songs (“Black Umbrella”). Too few achieve the emotional precision of “A Knock at the Door” or “An Encounter with General Zhou.”
A curiosity at best.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-231-13848-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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