The moral of these excellent tales: Never underestimate your small-town neighbor/bedfellow.
Ten Gogol-like tales about provincial scheming, in a first English translation for Vietnamese writer, actress, director and painter Doan Le.
Many of these picaresque stories are set in a rural area called Chua Village, a microcosm for Vietnamese society that’s rife with class and sex oppression, feudal backwardness and government corruption. In the first, title, story, the ghosts of the local cemetery all look forward to the initiation ceremony of a new arrival—the well-decorated brigadier general in the glass coffin—except that the figure who emerges is an electrician, third class retired, whose body was switched for the great man at the mortuary because of a failure to have greased the attending guard’s palm with the customary “gratuity.” “The Real Estate of Chua Village” is a satiric look at a weasely resident who attempts to sell the village pond, setting off a real-estate fever among the clannish residents who try to outdo each other in get-rich-quick schemes. In “The Venus of Chua Village,” a none-too-successful painter of The Twenty Springtimes of Woman accepts the modeling services of a beautiful young village girl sold off by her brother to pay his gambling debts. Her sacrifice deeply touches the painter, and he never parts with the painting until years later, when it’s stolen by the model’s daughter to redress her mother’s martyrdom. Occasionally, Doan Le slips into Kafkaesque allegory, as in “Achieving Flyhood,” about an aging, divorced acrobat who petitions the housing authorities for an apartment but is transformed into a fly—a gay fly, at that—and so is happily rid of the problem of housing (and women) for good. Elsewhere, stories achieve a personal, poignant tone, as in “The Double Bed of Chua Village,” about the narrator wife in bed with her sleeping husband as she resolves, clear-eyed but sorrowfully, to leave her mate of 28 years before he leaves her.
The moral of these excellent tales: Never underestimate your small-town neighbor/bedfellow.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-931896-12-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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