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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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