.
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
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
A little-known story that will have special resonance for today’s resisters.
Based on an actual incident in Nazi-occupied Belgium, Ramzipoor’s debut is a tragicomic account of fake news for a cause.
Structured like a heist movie, the novel follows several members of a conspiracy in Enghien, Belgium, who have a daring plan. The conspirators do not intend to survive this caper, only to bring some humor—and encouragement for resisters—into the grim existence of Belgians under Nazi rule. To this end, the plotters—among them Marc Aubrion, a journalist and comic; David Spiegelman, an expert forger; Lada Tarcovich, a smuggler and sex worker; and Gamin, a girl masquerading as a male street urchin—intend to...publish a newspaper. And only one issue of a newspaper, to be substituted on one night for the regular evening paper, Le Soir, which has become a mouthpiece for Nazi disinformation. Le Faux Soir, as the changeling paper is appropriately dubbed, will feature satire, doctored photographs making fun of Hitler, and wry requests for a long-overdue Allied invasion. (Target press date: Nov. 11, 1943.) To avoid immediate capture, the Faux Soir staff must act as double agents, convincing (or maybe not) the local Nazi commandant, August Wolff, that they are actually putting out an anti-Allies “propaganda bomb.” The challenge of fleshing out and differentiating so many colorful characters, combined with the sheer logistics of acquiring paper, ink, money, facilities, etc. under the Gestapo’s nose, makes for an excruciatingly slow exposé of how this sausage will be made. The banter here, reminiscent of the better Ocean’s Eleven sequels, keeps the mechanism well oiled, but it is still creaky. A few scenes amply illustrate the brutality of the Occupation, and sexual orientation works its way in: Lada is a lesbian and David, in addition to being a Jew, is gay—August Wolff’s closeted desire may be the only reason David has, so far, escaped the camps. The genuine pathos at the end of this overdetermined rainbow may be worth the wait.
A little-known story that will have special resonance for today’s resisters.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0815-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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