by Lulu Wang & translated by Hester Velmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2000
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A stunning first novel from Wang, a Chinese émigré to Holland, depicts a young girl’s coming of age under the specter of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
When Lian Shui develops an unsightly rash, her mother Yunxiang, a university professor who’s to be sent to a reeducation camp in the countryside to mend her “bourgeois intellectual” ways, begs to be allowed to stay in Beijing to care for her daughter. The Head of the Party Committee takes pity and allows Lian’s mother to take the child with her to the camp. There, Lian’s education begins, as some of China’s best scholars become her tutors, educating her in the old ways, while she forms lasting friendships and uncensored ideas that Mao has forbidden. Isolated among adults, and precocious by nature, Lian later spends her youth amid the waves of terror and suffering wrought by the Cultural Revolution. She sees her beloved teachers persecuted and humiliated, and, after the family is allowed to return to Beijing, where she reconnects with her childhood friend Kim, she learns at firsthand the paucity and hypocrisy of Mao’s teachings. While he venerated the peasants and the working class, Kim, a “third caster, a mud-hut dweller,” is nonetheless vilified by students and teachers alike, no matter how she succeeds in the revolutionary virtues. Like Anne Frank before her, Lian is the eyes and heart of history, retaining the energy and hope of youth, the individuality of a thinker, while experiencing the pangs of adolescence and friendship that no regime or dictator can squelch. Wang’s prose, translated from the original Dutch, felicitously mixes the old with the new (“I didn’t give a hoot about what the others might make of it, but I was left reeling, as if the sky had landed on my head”); and, though the pace is leisurely, moral principles lie hidden in everyday occurrences. A rich, revealing, and powerful debut.
.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-48985-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
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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