by Fiona Cheong ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001
On balance, skillful work that should appeal to lovers of mystical literature—including Maxine Hong Kingston’s Warrior Woman.
Modern-day Singapore becomes a whispering thicket of ghosts and gossip in a mysterious though in some ways unsatisfying tale.
Perhaps as a defense against possible criticism of Shadow Theatre’s multilayered voices and personalities, Cheong (The Scent of the Gods, 1991), a teacher at the University of Pittsburgh, makes one of her main characters a novelist whose American publisher is troubled by her latest book’s multiple voices: “Don’t Americans know how to pay attention to several people talking at one time? They should come sit at a dinner table over here.” The story is set in a tightly connected Singapore neighborhood that’s full to bursting with history and yet is slowly being subsumed by spiritless modernity. Tongues start wagging when local girl Shakilah Nair, the novelist, returns after many years in America, pregnant and with a scandalously bare left hand. But for all the noise about Shakilah’s condition, it is hardly the most notable of things going on: philandering, murder, and abuse, for example, not to mention the ghosts that seem to lurk behind every bush and the stories of vampires and local shamans. Cheong approaches her tale from all angles and by means of many different narrators, including servants, tongue-clucking gossips, and teenaged girls eager for exploration and discovery. All is conveyed in Cheong’s musical take on Singapore language, a sing-songy rhythm that from the first page pleasantly engulfs the reader amid a luscious blend of cultures and languages—Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Catholic, Muslim, animist—that further makes for a seductive setting. If only it were easier to clarify what is taking place: it isn’t the many narrators that muddy the narrative, it’s Cheong’s restless jumping around and her coy way with facts—flaws that don’t make for an unpleasant experience, merely an occasionally frustrating one.
On balance, skillful work that should appeal to lovers of mystical literature—including Maxine Hong Kingston’s Warrior Woman.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-287-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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by Fiona Cheong
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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