Unlikely to appeal to the average reader.
Of opium pellets and smoke-filled alleys: an episodic novel of the Chinese demimonde, first published in 1894.
Literary scholar David Der-wei Wang offers in a foreword that this is the “greatest late Qing courtesan novel,” highly specific praise indeed. Han blends psychological realism and stylized convention in writing of courtesans, bearing such names as Twin Pearl and Gold Phoenix, who have made their way from unpromising places in the countryside to establish themselves in China’s first modern, westernized city; some of their customers, law-abiding citizens and family men such as Lotuson Wang and Bamboo Hu, actually think that the girls love them, but the girls themselves know that their work is part of an elaborate charade. In the way of a period opera, the action moves slowly; as one chapter header has it, “a new girl is given strict instructions at her toilet, and old debts are lightly dismissed by a hanger-on.” Though Chang (Written on Water, 2005, etc.) thought well enough of Bangqing’s novel to undertake a translation first from Wu into Mandarin Chinese and then into English, the book was never popular in China; even Chang allows that “there is no sensuous quality” in the book, unlikely to fulfill any would-be reader’s prurient expectations. It does not help that the English translation, revised by Hung, has a certain tin-ear, unidiomatic quality: “Instead of a party, just treat me to your buns. That’s easy for you and won’t cost you anything, right?”; “You know, I had just fallen asleep when you made all that racket and got yourself cursed at”; and “The two of them drank sparingly as they poured out their feelings to each other, and dinner was over only when they had fully enjoyed themselves.”
Unlikely to appeal to the average reader.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-231-12268-3
Page Count: 556
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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