Complex in plot yet simple and intense in style, Osborne’s narrative takes us into an Asian heart of darkness.
A journey through contemporary Cambodia, where we encounter gambling, drugs, murder—and the mystery of human identity.
Englishman Robert Grieve is bored with his life as a teacher in Sussex and spends his holidays in faraway places such as Greece and Iceland. One summer he goes to Thailand, and out of ennui as well as a spirit of adventure, he decides to travel to Cambodia. On his first night there, he gets lucky at cards and wins $2,000. It turns out this will bankroll a substantial vacation, so he decides to stay for a while and see what fate will bring. He soon meets a charismatic American, Simon Beauchamp, an expatriate with an aura of the sinister about him. Independently wealthy, Beauchamp is very much at home in the Khmer culture and begins to serve as Grieve’s guide and mentor in Cambodian ways. Grieve decides to hang his shingle as a tutor of English, and very soon a Dr. Sar makes arrangements for him to tutor his daughter, Sophal, who becomes both Grieve’s student and his lover. Something doesn’t quite feel right, however, because Sophal is quite a woman of the world—she’s been studying medicine in Paris—and her English is excellent, so it’s not clear to Grieve why her father insists on the connection. And now Osborne (The Ballad of a Small Player, 2014, etc.) cunningly convolutes his narrative and turns it in a Graham Green–ish direction, for perversely, Grieve starts to introduce himself as “Simon Beauchamp,” a confusion that will eventually lead him into danger. After a terrible crime is committed against Beauchamp, Davuth, a smooth and utterly corrupt policeman, gets involved in the case and vows to turn it to his own advantage.
Complex in plot yet simple and intense in style, Osborne’s narrative takes us into an Asian heart of darkness.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44734-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
A strong, absorbing Chilean family chronicle, plushly upholstered—with mystical undercurrents (psychic phenomena) and a measure of leftward political commitment. (The author is a cousin of ex-Pres. Salvador Allende, an ill-fated socialist.) The Truebas are estate-owners of independent wealth, of whom only one—the eventual patriarch, Esteban—fully plays his class role. Headstrong and conservative, Esteban is a piggish youth, mistreating his peons and casually raping his girl servants . . . until he falls under the spell of young Clara DelValle: mute for nine years after witnessing the gruesome autopsy of her equally delicate sister, Clara is capable of telekinesis and soothsaying; she's a pure creature of the upper realms who has somehow dropped into crude daily life. So, with opposites attracting, the marriage of Esteban and Clara is inevitable—as is the succession of Clara-influenced children and grandchildren. Daughter Blanca ignores Class barriers to fall in love with—and bear a child by—the foreman's son, who will later become a famous leftwing troubadour (on the model of Victor Jara). Twin boys Jaime and Nicholas head off in different directions—one growing up to become a committed physician, the other a mystic/entrepreneur. And Alba, the last clairvoyant female of the lineage, will end the novel in a concentration camp of the Pinochet regime. Allende handles the theosophical elements here matter-of-factly: the paranormal powers of the Trueba women have to be taken more or less on faith. (Veteran readers of Latin American fiction have come to expect mysticism as part of the territory.) And the political sweep sometimes seems excessively insistent or obtrusive: even old Esteban recants from his reactionary ways at the end, when they seem to destroy his family. ("Thus the months went by, and it became clear to everyone, even Senator Trueba, that the military had seized power to keep it for themselves and not hand the country over to the politicians of the right who made the coup possible.") But there's a comfortable, appealing professionalism to Allende's narration, slowly turning the years through the Truebas' passions and secrets and fidelities. She doesn't rush; the characters are clear and sharp; there's style here but nothing self-conscious or pretentious. So, even if this saga isn't really much deeper than the Belva Plain variety, it's uncommonly satisfying—with sturdy, old-fashioned storytelling and a fine array of exotic, historical shadings.
Pub Date: May 23, 1985
ISBN: 0553383809
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1985
BOOK TO SCREEN
APPRECIATIONS
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her...
Love and ambition clash in a novel depicting China's turbulent 1980s.
Jin's debut is at heart a mystery, as a young Chinese American woman returns to China to try to understand her recently deceased mother's decisions and to find her biological father. Liya grew up with a single mother, the brilliant but troubled physicist Su Lan, who refused to talk about Liya's missing father. Mother and daughter grew increasingly estranged as Su Lan obsessed over her theoretical research. Complicating Liya's search for truth is the fact she was born in Beijing on June 4, 1989, the very night of the government crackdown on the protesters at Tiananmen Square. Su Lan changed Liya's birth year on her papers to obscure this fact in America. The reader is meant to wonder if Liya's father perhaps died during the crackdown. However, this is not a novel about the idealism of the student reform movement or even the decisions behind the government's use of lethal force. Instead Jin focuses on the personalities of three students: the young Su Lan as well as Zhang Bo and Li Yongzong, two of her high school classmates who were rivals for her affection. The novel shifts point of view and jumps back and forth in time, obscuring vital pieces of information from the reader in order to prolong the mystery. Not all the plot contrivances make sense, but Su Lan is a fascinating character of a type rarely seen in fiction, an ambitious woman whose intellect and drive allow her to envision changing the very nature of time. The title refers to the thoughts of a nurse, musing about the similarities that she sees between the Tiananmen student demonstrators and the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution: "A hunger for revolution, any Great Revolution, whatever it stands for, so long as where you stand is behind its angry fist. Little gods, she thinks."
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her ambition.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293595-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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