A warm, intellectually rich journey through several nations and identities.
A Chinese-American woman reimagines her parent’s flight from China in this semifictional debut memoir.
In this darkly enchanting book, Zhang interrogates and re-creates the turbulent life of her father, a Chinese émigré, and the last half-century of Chinese history—some of which she saw for herself while visiting the country over the years. Zhang’s father, whom she here calls “Wang Kun,” grew up in a country that was in thrall to regional thuggery, brutal Japanese occupation, and all-consuming civil war; by 1949, Mao Zedong had won that war. Wang Kun studied with two literature-professor sisters from a powerful family that he called “the Kennedys of China” and later fled the country by way of Hong Kong for the West. Zhang says that she spent a good part of her life “renouncing all things Chinese”; now, in the course of her father’s “slow but unstoppable degeneration,” she works to piece his history together. The resulting book is partly fictional, with italicized, imaginative chapters interspersed with straight memoir and settings ranging from wartime Chongqing to upstate New York. The photographs that pepper the text are useful and create a scrapbook-ish verisimilitude. However, the book would have been nearly as strong without them, as Zhang delivers images in prose that are far more powerful than any photograph could communicate. One paragraph evokes the “thick plumes of smoke” moving across the waters of a devastated Nanking; another passage describes a pit near Gele Mountain, containing “94 bodies…bound with handcuffs bearing the inscription ‘Made in Springfield, Massachusetts.’ ” As a child, Zhang says, she had difficulty making sense of the different elements of her father—his charm, his temper, his formidable intellect, and the fact that he would nonetheless “play the Laughing Chinaman for American audiences” at cocktail parties. But in the end, through her exploration and self-described “embellishments,” she gives readers a real and unified man.
A warm, intellectually rich journey through several nations and identities.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-885030-52-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Kaya Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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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