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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an...
True love flares between two people, but they find that circumstances always impede it.
On a winter day in London, Laurie spots Jack from her bus home and he sparks a feeling in her so deep that she spends the next year searching for him. Her roommate and best friend, Sarah, is the perfect wing-woman but ultimately—and unknowingly—ends the search by finding Jack and falling for him herself. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Perhaps she would have total success, but the fact of the matter is that Jack feels the same deep connection to Laurie. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. Patriarchy—it hurts men, too! There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions.
Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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