A political opera written in an often flat, journalistic style, but Fang and Mei Ling are indelible characters.
In her first novel, Lovett chronicles the human cost of building China’s Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.
Liu earns a meager livelihood scavenging the villages abandoned as the Yangtze rises. After finding a forsaken baby girl at the river’s edge, he approaches Fang, an entrepreneur who offers to help sell the baby to an orphanage. At the last minute Liu, whose beloved wife died while pregnant two years earlier, decides to keep the baby he calls Rose. With the help of an elderly neighbor, Liu learns to care for Rose. He also begins to court a waitress, Mei Ling, at the newly thriving restaurant of his friend Tai. Liu, Tai and Mei Ling all come from villages swept away by the dam’s creation. Mei Ling left her parents once they were relocated rather than be forced into an arranged marriage, but as a good daughter she continues to send money home. Tai plays matchmaker, throwing Liu and Mei Ling together as they work to open Tai’s new, larger restaurant. Mei Ling accepts Liu’s marriage proposal, but has difficulty adjusting to her new domestic life, in particular to the demands of feisty little Rose. When a job opportunity occurs in another city, she takes it and finds herself falling in love with her boss. Meanwhile Fang, who spent his youth in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, hears from an old friend, Longshan, whose sister Sulin remains the lost love of Fang’s life. Rose is Sulin’s granddaughter. Fang approaches Liu to sell the child back shortly after Mei Ling asks for a divorce. Afraid of losing Rose and assuming he’s already lost Mei Ling, Liu leaves town with Rose to start a new life elsewhere without leaving a forwarding address. Fang’s love and submerged idealism mingle as he involves himself in Longshan and Sulin’s fight to receive compensation for their forced relocation.
A political opera written in an often flat, journalistic style, but Fang and Mei Ling are indelible characters.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-935248-13-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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