A complex, confrontational, demanding—and ultimately rewarding—work.
An unconscious protagonist is the central figure around whom a tapestry of political and personal histories is woven, in the latest from Chinese author Ma Jian (stories: Stick Out Your Tongue, 2006, etc.).
Dai Wei, a student at Beijing University, is active in the pro-democracy protest movement that met violent reprisals in the 1989 catastrophe in Tiananmen Square. Dai Wei is shot in the head, rendered comatose, given token medical treatment, then released into the custody of his widowed mother. Then, in a flexible narrative that moves smoothly between immobile death-in-life and the remembered circumstances of childhood and youth, Ma Jian recreates years of mounting tensions between idealistic youths and the agents of a government determined to stifle all difference and dissent. As Dai Wei’s body functions independently, his mind responds to news and gossip brought by a decade’s worth of visitors (e.g., former classmates who arrive to help “celebrate” his birthday), and revisits his brief, turbulent past. Heady arguments with passionately politicized fellow students are juxtaposed with plaintive glimpsed images of random sexual experiences and unfulfilled romantic relationships. Vacillating awareness of his mother’s embittered caretaking jostle against fragmentary memories of his late father (a stubbornly independent anticommunist, whose fate prefigured Dai Wei’s own). The novel is overlong, marred by Ma Jian’s tendency to abandon drama for extended argument (especially in scenes featuring student protestors). But the arguments are generally vigorous and compelling, and cohere into a rich context that explains the comatose Dai Wei’s deeply rooted will to live—and prepares for the ironic conclusion, in which this Asian Rip Van Winkle awakens, after a decade “lived” only in memory and imagination, on the cusp of the new millennium, into an altered world.
A complex, confrontational, demanding—and ultimately rewarding—work.Pub Date: June 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-11017-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
Clunky prose and long-winded dissertations on comparative religion can’t impede the breathless momentum of the Demon-Drop...
A convicted murderer who may be a latter-day Messiah wants to donate his heart to the sister of one of his victims, in Picoult’s frantic 15th (Nineteen Minutes, 2007, etc.).
Picoult specializes in hot-button issues. This latest blockbuster-to-be stars New Hampshire’s first death-row inmate in decades, Shay Bourne, a 33-year-old carpenter and drifter convicted of murdering the police officer husband of his employer, June, and her seven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Eleven years later Shay is still awaiting execution by lethal injection. Suddenly, miracles start to happen around Shay—cell-block tap water turns to wine, an AIDS-stricken fellow inmate is cured, a pet bird and then a guard are resurrected from the dead. Shay’s spiritual adviser, Father Michael, is beginning to believe that Shay is a reincarnation of Christ, particularly when the uneducated man starts quoting key phrases from the Gnostic gospels. Michael hasn’t told Shay that he served on the jury that condemned him to death. June’s daughter Claire, in dire need of a heart transplant, is slowly dying. When Shay, obeying the Gnostic prescription to “bring forth what is within you,” offers, through his attorney, ACLU activist Maggie, to donate his heart, June is at first repelled. Practical obstacles also arise: A viable heart cannot be harvested from a lethally injected donor. So Maggie sues in Federal Court to require the state to hang Shay instead, on the grounds that his intended gift is integral to his religious beliefs. Shay’s execution looms, and then Father Michael learns more troubling news: Shay, who, like Jesus, didn’t defend himself at trial, may be innocent.
Clunky prose and long-winded dissertations on comparative religion can’t impede the breathless momentum of the Demon-Drop plot.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7434-9674-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
A sparkling, laugh-out-loud novel.
Polished debut fiction, from Australian author Simsion, about a brilliant but emotionally challenged geneticist who develops a questionnaire to screen potential mates but finds love instead. The book won the 2012 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.
“I became aware of applause. It seemed natural. I had been living in the world of romantic comedy and this was the final scene. But it was real.” So Don Tillman, our perfectly imperfect narrator and protagonist, tells us. While he makes this observation near the end of the book, it comes as no surprise—this story plays the rom-com card from the first sentence. Don is challenged, almost robotic. He cannot understand social cues, barely feels emotion and can’t stand to be touched. Don’s best friends are Gene and Claudia, psychologists. Gene brought Don as a postdoc to the prestigious university where he is now an associate professor. Gene is a cad, a philanderer who chooses women based on nationality—he aims to sleep with a woman from every country. Claudia is tolerant until she’s not. Gene sends Rosie, a graduate student in his department, to Don as a joke, a ringer for the Wife Project. Finding her woefully unsuitable, Don agrees to help the beautiful but fragile Rosie learn the identity of her biological father. Pursuing this Father Project, Rosie and Don collide like particles in an atom smasher: hilarity, dismay and carbonated hormones ensue. The story lurches from one set piece of deadpan nudge-nudge, wink-wink humor to another: We laugh at, and with, Don as he tries to navigate our hopelessly emotional, nonliteral world, learning as he goes. Simsion can plot a story, set a scene, write a sentence, finesse a detail. A pity more popular fiction isn’t this well-written. If you liked Australian author Toni Jordan's Addition (2009), with its math-obsessed, quirky heroine, this book is for you.
A sparkling, laugh-out-loud novel.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2908-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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