An exploration of contemporary Taiwan through the lens of the past, this novel hits many poignant notes as it threads its...
Yinghong, a Taiwanese woman, struggles with an all-consuming love for a magnetic businessman while remembering her gentle, unconventional father, who was imprisoned for dissident views.
In this novel, originally published in 1990, Ang (The Butcher’s Wife, 1983, etc.) contrasts a naïve young girl's relationship with her protective, kindly father and her later sexual obsession with a much colder man. Ang sketches both men clearly. Yinghong’s father, Zhu Zuyan, validates and encourages his timid daughter, helping her acquire knowledge fitting for a member of a gentry family. Lin Xigeng, on the other hand, is a regular in the seamy world of Taiwan nightlife and is headstrong and materialistic. He represents the new Taiwan, one economically on the move, while Zhu was caught up in the violent repression of the early days of Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. Yinghong suffers a lasting trauma when she sees her father abducted by brutish soldiers. Zhu is returned to the family because of his poor health and takes refuge in the Lotus Garden of the book’s title, which Ang renders in delicate, often compelling detail that also occasionally bogs the narrative down. Once the back-and-forth, past-to-present structure of the book is established, it begins to feel as if the flashbacks are mostly desultory episodes rather than events that develop the characters’ qualities. But in Zhu, Ang has created a character the reader genuinely cares about—we feel his warmth and intelligence, and Yinghong’s great love for him makes sense. Still, it’s the present-day story that seems more intriguing. Ang circles around it tantalizingly, describing Yinghong’s dreamy fall into erotic obsession with delicate precision and creating suspense with implications that Lin is a far darker character than he at first appears. This suspense doesn’t entirely pay off, and though the novel's separate elements aren't always woven into a satisfying whole, they're often written with such grace that they offer incidental pleasures. Lin is superb at writing sex scenes, and there are many in this book. She is also a keen observer of plant life.
An exploration of contemporary Taiwan through the lens of the past, this novel hits many poignant notes as it threads its way.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-17554-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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