An inconsistent but appealing novel about life and love within the strictures of a repressive regime.
An emotionally resonant coming-of-age story set during China’s Cultural Revolution.
When Li Ling receives a letter notifying him of his former lover’s death, his wife notices his distress and inquires about it; virtually the entire story is contained within his flashback narrative. He tells of being captivated by Zhang Lily from the moment he met her as a young schoolboy recently returned to Shanghai from Hong Kong. The two quickly became inseparable, eventually including Big Head, another young boy, in their childhood adventures. But their lives were turned upside down by the communist rise to power. Suddenly, Zhang Lily’s father, a professor, and Li Ling’s father, a surgeon, were stripped of professional esteem; schoolchildren were forced to labor in factories and fields; suspected dissidents were subjected to forceful re-education and public censure. Torn apart by the demands of an oppressive state, the lovers promised to hold each other in their hearts forever. Years of drudgery passed before college admissions were reinstated on a large scale, at which point the couple coincidentally found themselves enrolled at the same institution. However, the reunion, while joyful, proved to be not quite what Li Ling expected. Chen (The Mystery of Revenge, 2013 ) offers a somewhat meandering story, but the sedate pacing allows for a deeper exploration of the effects of the Cultural Revolution on individual lives. Dialogue is generally natural and authentic, though some sections are unrealistically didactic (e.g., a stilted discussion of the importance of free elections). The plotting is similarly uneven, a mix of engaging plot twists with those that lack credibility, as with an accused rapist’s initial reluctance to defend himself due to his worrying about his accuser’s potential punishment. Repeated references to the forget-me-not Lily gave Li Ling can be a bit heavy-handed, though the motif itself is endearing. Minor editing errors (e.g., “we were just prawns in the manipulative hands of the state”) are pervasive but don’t detract significantly. The flashback device is necessary for a surprise conclusion that, though only mildly surprising, is nonetheless satisfying.
An inconsistent but appealing novel about life and love within the strictures of a repressive regime.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1625108470
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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