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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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