A major rediscovery.
Entrenched cultural values collide with rapid social change in this collection of the stories and novellas of the late (1920–95) Chinese author.
Most of Chang’s protagonists are young women seeking escape from the narrow paths of convention in which a patriarchal society has enclosed them. But there are significant exceptions. In “Jasmine Tea,” unprepossessing student Chuanqing, dominated by his wealthy father, his austere mentor and the latter’s capricious daughter (his fellow student), attempts “escape” from his imprisoning mediocrity in an impulsive violent act—which fails utterly to alter his insignificance and self-hatred. “Red Rose, White Rose” traces the sexual history of successful young executive Zhenbao, through a sexless first crush, a ruinous affair with an unstable married woman and acquiescence to the quiet wife whose endless patience and iron will put him firmly, unhappily in his place. The yearning for escape (a recurring theme) is satisfactorily resolved only, if imperfectly, in the title novella, a compact group portrayal of a financially strapped Shanghai family who subsist on advantageous marriages, and specifically of the mousy daughter (Liusu) who fashions a “victory” over the seducer who hesitates to marry her, out of the ashes of the events of Dec. 7, 1941. Chang succeeds brilliantly in the story of idealistic student Weilong and her eventual absorption into the lifestyle that has made her querulous aunt both a wealthy matron and a de facto procuress (“Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier”); and especially in “The Golden Cangue,” in which a houseful of concubines and their children enact a cycle of dependence and submission that will never be broken. Employing gorgeous spare imagery (e.g., “the moon was barely visible . . . a dab of black, a dab of white like a ferocious theatrical mask”) and a seductive tone of worldly fatalism, Chang depicts a woman’s fate as memorably as do Colette’s tales of La Belle Époque.
A major rediscovery.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59017-178-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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