From the author of last year's Red Azalea—a highly praised memoir of growing up during the Cultural Revolution—comes a bittersweet story as much about love as about the malignant legacy of Maoist China. Twenty-nine-year-old Zebra Wong begins her story in 1982, ``a year depression swam through the veins of the nation.'' The Cultural Revolution is over, Mao is dead, and China is slowly changing, but individual lives are still subject to bureaucratic whim and control. Zebra and her classmates, temporarily excused from regular factory work, are attending a special work-study English program in Shanghai, Zebra's hometown. Like Zebra, her fellow students had worshipped Mao, spent their adolescence learning his teachings, and then worked in remote agricultural regions during the 1970's. Now ``former'' revolutionaries, they bitterly realize that ``our youth had faded without a trace...[as] we learned to distrust...acted like heartless robots, our souls wrapped in darkness.'' But Katherine, a young American in Shanghai to teach English while she completes her dissertation, soon changes their attitudes and their lives with her gaiety and openness- -changes that will eventually harm both herself and her students because, as she's warned, ``no one tells the truth here. You have to figure out where to find the truth.'' Zebra, who'd been raped by the local party chief while performing forced labor in the countryside, is instantly fascinated by Katherine's beauty and stories of American life. And though Zebra has a loveless affair with a fellow student, who will cynically marry an official's daughter to get a scholarship to go abroad, she finds herself increasingly in love with Katherine. Eventually, though, Katherine's incautious spontaneity, her political naãvetÇ, and others' jealous betrayals lead to her deportation—as well as to a harsh penalty for Zebra ended only by changing politics and some loyal friends end. Lyrical prose with a distinct Chinese flavor makes Min's first novel—and its times—even more poignant and resonant.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-57322-005-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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