by Gao Xingjian & translated by Mabel Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 10, 2000
It all eventually coheres into a vision of an inchoate, voracious culture from which any sentient soul might understandably...
Readers surprised by the recent news that obscure Chinese dissident expatriate Gao had won this year’s Nobel Prize may still be seeking enlightenment even after they’ve finished this imperturbably meditative and leisurely 1989 “novel”—his first fiction translated into English.
The few known facts about its author’s life are subsumed in its narrative: a first-person account by a writer and artist out of favor with Communist authorities, who is mistakenly diagnosed with terminal cancer and undertakes a journey throughout his country’s remote central and northern provinces, in hopes of escaping the burden of connections—personal and political alike—with both other people and institutions. The narrator imagines an alternative self (“You”) and a woman companion (“She”) “who” are in effect only pronominal projections of a single sensibility—as it encounters various representatives of Chinese society: miscellaneous villagers, rangers protecting government “preserves” and itinerant acrobats “enact[ing] . . . scenes of grossly unnatural human distortion,” hermitic Daoist priests and “Wild Men” prowling the forests, among many others. A semblance of plot appears in his wavering intimacy with “the woman,” whose dreams of a normal life among others contradict his hopeful drift toward absolute independence. Ironically enough, his peregrinations introduce him to people, stories, and natural phenomena (including the beckoning mountaintop) that trigger memories of his earlier life, and challenge his willed retreat from the quotidian (“I am still seduced by the human world,” he ruefully concludes, “I still haven’t lived enough”). It’s an arduous trek for the reader, redeemed by such vivid set pieces as a hair-raising visit to a “panda observation compound”; the tale of an elderly carpenter obliged to carve the likeness of a goddess who he knows will punish him for his sins; and a fascinating anecdotal account of the founding of the Ming Dynasty.
It all eventually coheres into a vision of an inchoate, voracious culture from which any sentient soul might understandably recoil. A dramatically promising situation; one wishes it had been framed in a story.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-621082-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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by Gao Xingjian & translated by Mabel Lee
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by Gao Xingjian
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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