Although he depends too heavily on aphorisms and plot switchbacks, Qiu Xiaolong follows in the tradition of Naguib Mahfouz,...
These 23 stories, first published in Le Monde, by Shanghai native Qiu Xiaolong (The Mao Case, 2009, etc.) follow China’s political evolution from 1949 to 2006 as it impacts the socio-economically diverse characters who reside on the Shanghai street of the title.
In 1949, with Mao’s forces approaching, a young man helps an opera singer escape Shanghai. In payment the singer gives him a portable blackboard on which he begins a newsletter for his neighbors. In the stories that follow, each year’s primary political event is recorded on the blackboard and followed by a personal if sometimes pointedly symbolic story that demonstrates the private upheavals determined by public policy. Food is a central motif. In 1952, a crab dinner takes on both erotic and political significance as the hosts, a young “workshop” owner and his wife, grow depressingly aware that their lives as capitalists are about to change. A man’s birth during the starvation years of land reform gives him a rapacious appetite but eventually leads to his success as a salesman who can dine with capitalist clients to gross excess in 2003. Another basic need, housing, also serves as both cause and effect. In 1988, an office worker marries to get an apartment. By 2000, a young entrepreneur buys the factory that his father once managed and plans to tear it down for a housing project. As the Communist Party switches directions economically, individuals submissively follow. In 1958, during “The Great Leap Forward” period, a tofu-maker works in a steel factory where he becomes a prominent worker poet. By 1996, worker poetry is out, private enterprise is in and he’s again selling tofu for his living. The final 2006 story concerns a lottery winner, chance being as good an explanation as any for these characters’ vicissitudes of fortune.
Although he depends too heavily on aphorisms and plot switchbacks, Qiu Xiaolong follows in the tradition of Naguib Mahfouz, writing about a changing world with both affection and a skeptic’s sense of irony.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-62809-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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