Jin dutifully explores Li Bai’s status as a major, high-spirited poet but with little of the vigor of his subject.
The National Book Award–winning Chinese-American novelist and poet sketches the life of one of his native country’s foundational poets.
Jin’s (Creative Writing/Boston Univ.; The Boat Rocker, 2016, etc.) subject, Li Bai (701-762), better known to Western readers as Li Po, wrote about rural China with a melancholy grace; his work is suffused with long rivers ferrying travelers under watchful moons, leaving lovers and drinking partners behind. The creator of this poised and forceful (if somber) work was restless, constantly torn between wanting a secure government perch and wanting to abandon mainstream society entirely. The son of a merchant, he grew up in relative financial comfort, but because of a cultural distrust of businessmen, he found it nearly impossible to qualify for officialdom. Instead, he traveled, often for years at a time, all but abandoning his wife and children, writing poems that caught the attention of fellow poets like Du Fu and of royalty; for a time, he was a favorite of the Tang dynasty emperor. However, court life felt like a gilded cage, and his attempts at statecraft were dismissed as amateurish. Li Bai is an intriguing bundle of contradictions, but Jin seems to struggle with how to reconcile them. The author is a careful, deliberate stylist, which has made for finely understated novels and short stories. When writing nonfiction, though—especially regarding a subject like Li Bai, where accurate historical records are sparse—his writing becomes restrained, even wooden. Though Jin has accessed Chinese-language sources, his book is often frustratingly bereft of interpretive power or context. For example, the author barely examines the publishing industry (or word of mouth) that led to Li Bai’s rising stardom but fusses over picayune squabbles about his behavior at court. Jin’s fine translations of his subject’s poems are blessedly abundant, but he resists delivering deep interpretations of them.
Jin dutifully explores Li Bai’s status as a major, high-spirited poet but with little of the vigor of his subject.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4741-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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