Xu’s writing, precise and elegant, saves a too conventional plot.
Silence—literal and figurative—is the topic of this debut novel in which an American neurologist helps a Chinese businessman regain his powers of speech.
While sharing a dinner at the Swan Hotel, Li Jing and his father are nearly killed in a gas leak explosion. Old Professor Li is weakened, but it is young Li Jing, a wealthy, charismatic businessman, who is transformed. Though he is able to understand written and spoken Chinese, he is unable to speak it himself, and instead can only mutter phrases in English, his first language. Li Jing was born and raised in America, but the widowed Professor Li moved the two to Shanghai when Li Jing was still an adolescent. Suffering from bilingual aphasia—with the irony that his “second” language is the one he has been using his whole adult life—the family offers a fellowship to American Rosalyn Neal to help rehabilitate Li Jing, in the hopes that in recovering the more accessible English, his Chinese will follow. Newly divorced Rosalyn is escaping her guilt and loneliness in Shanghai, and soon forms an attachment to the vulnerable Li Jing. Meanwhile, Li Jing’s wife Meiling must quit her job as a poetry editor and take over Li Jing’s investment business, an endeavor that keeps her away from Li Jing and creates a festering resentment between the two (though it is unclear why Li Jing can’t do his work with Meiling as his mouthpiece—a failing of the novel). The drama unfolds against the changing face of Shanghai, a place that is as mysterious to Rosalyn as it is now to Li Jing, isolated in his silence. Despite the broad sweep and the unusual circumstances, the novel turns into a story about a traditional love triangle—and they rarely turn out well.
Xu’s writing, precise and elegant, saves a too conventional plot.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58654-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
