The title is the second-best thing about this extremely uneven anthology of 20 stories written between 1985 and 1993. The best is ``The Brothers Shu,'' by Su Tong (the acclaimed Raise the Red Lantern, 1993), a preternaturally vivid vision of family unhappiness and hatred that blend together sexual torment, homicidal sibling rivalry, shape-shifting, and an aborted love suicide into a fiercely comic Dostoyevskian stew that fairly spews vitriol off the page. It's a defiant, and welcome, corrective to the collection's overall imaginative blandness. As editor and translator Goldblatt points out in his introduction, a moral and aesthetic backlash is evident in much of the literary expression that has followed the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The work gathered here includes realistic tales of family and village conflict (Li Xiao's ``Grass on the Rooftop,'' Mo Yan's ``The Cure''), concentrated studies of erotic fixation (Li Rui's ``Sham Marriage,'' Ai Bei's ``Green Earth Mother''), and accounts of psychological enigma or disturbance frequently poised between reality and nightmare (Yu Hua's ``The Past and the Punishments,'' Duo Duo's ``The Day I Got to Xi'an,'' and Chen Cun's provocative ``Footsteps on the Roof''). But too many of the tales are dominated by ironic reversals and trick endings of the sort already overfamiliar to Western readers; one self-consciously raucous, blackly comic tale (Wang Xiangfu's ``Fritter Hollow Chronicles'') climaxes with a very old and well-known dirty joke. Meanwhile, though, there are other first-rate efforts in addition to Su Tong's: the amusingly masochistic fantasy of Chen Ran's kinky ``Sunshine Between the Lips''; Can Xue's Kafkaesque chronicle of a fugitive murderer's delirious last days, ``The Summons''; and Kong Jiesheng's ambitious detailing of the energies, hostilities, and consequences churned up during an archaeological dig in ``The Sleeping Lion.'' Still, on balance, there's too much dross among the gold.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8021-1573-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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