A delicate and exquisite success: Hong infuses real life with the drama and pathos of the best fiction.
A fictionalized account of a love affair Julian Bell conducted with a Chinese woman during the mid-1930s, by London-based novelist Hong (Summer of Betrayal, 1997; a memoir, Daughter of the River, 1999).
If it’s true (for media types, at least) that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then Hong has hit pay dirt. Her story, as she admits, is based on a real-life event: namely, that in 1935 the Bloomsbury scion Julian Bell (son of Clive and Vanessa, nephew of Virginia Woolf), then a 28-year-old Cambridge scholar, went to teach at Wuhan University in China and carried on a passionate affair with the novelist Ling Shuhua, wife of a university dean. The story is so explicit—both sexually and historically—that Hong is currently being sued for libel by Shuhua’s daughter on behalf of her now-deceased mother (Chinese libel law applies to the dead as well as the living). Legal questions aside, K, first published in 1999 in Taiwan, is a pretty good story in its own right, reminiscent of Marguerite Duras in its impressionistic style and obsessive narrative pace. The plot is as straightforward as any boy-meets-girl story you’ll find on the shelf, but Hong adds depth and shading to the bare bones of the tale by drawing on the background, offering interesting glimpses of life within the happy confines of the Bloomsbury set, as well as under the darker clouds of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria or the Spanish Civil War. The character of Bell, who comes across as something of a spoiled and callow child, is greatly upstaged by the sensual and contradictory Shuhua. And the translation, while sometimes a bit stiff and prosaic (“There was such harmony in their lovemaking now that they could easily synchronize their orgasm”), is mostly fluid and unobtrusive.
A delicate and exquisite success: Hong infuses real life with the drama and pathos of the best fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7145-3072-7
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
