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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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