Another brilliant installment in Ha Jin’s history of modern China (The Crazed, 2002, etc.), written with his usual...
The Chinese-born American author offers the fictional memoirs (historically based) of a Chinese officer’s difficult years as a POW in the Korean War—and the more difficult return to China after the ceasefire.
Yu Yuan is no one’s idea of a revolutionary, but as an army cadet at the Nationalist military academy in 1949, he greets Mao’s victory over the Nationalist forces with genuine relief, disgusted as he was with the corruption and incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. He continues his military career under the Party and is eventually assigned to a “volunteer” unit of Chinese forces supporting the North Koreans against UN forces in the Korean War. Here, after his unit is ambushed, Yuan falls into American hands and is sent to a POW camp on an island off the Korean coast. He is pleasantly surprised to find little of the abuse that Party propaganda had assured the Chinese they would meet at the hands of American captors, but he is subjected to political pressures all the same. The Americans offer the Chinese prisoners a choice of repatriation to either Taiwan or the mainland, thus dividing the camp into Communist and Nationalist factions that fight among themselves. Although not a Communist, Yuan feels bound to return to China for the sake of his mother and fiancée, and this brings down upon him the wrath of the Nationalist prisoners, who go so far as to hold him down and tattoo anti-Communist propaganda on his chest. Even without the tattoo Yuan is a marked man back home, especially when the Cultural Revolution unleashes a pogrom against anyone deemed to have been tainted with Western ideas. But Yuan is canny enough to get by, and, having survived revolution, war, and prison, he manages to outlive the fanatics in the end.
Another brilliant installment in Ha Jin’s history of modern China (The Crazed, 2002, etc.), written with his usual understatement and clarity.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42276-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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