by Shan Sa & translated by Adriana Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2006
A compelling read and surprisingly easy to follow, given its exotic complexity.
In sharp contrast to her tightly focused previous novel (The Girl Who Played Go, 2003), Shan Sa, the China-born French novelist and painter, has written a sweeping panoramic historical novel about the seventh century’s Tang dynasty and China’s only woman emperor.
When a self-made timber merchant who has risen into minor nobility dies, he leaves his well-born wife and daughters at his crude family’s mercy until a visiting magistrate singles out the middle daughter, Heaven Light, for her intelligence. At 12, Heaven Light is summoned to the Imperial City to be one of 10,000 women who serve the Emperor. One of the Emperor’s wives sexually initiates Heaven Light (a not-uncommon practice within this Inner City, where no men are allowed) while her athletic skills attract the attention of the Emperor, whose secretary she becomes. She helps his young son, sweet-natured but uncertain Little Phoenix, become heir, but because she served his father, court rules say she cannot be Little Phoenix’s lover, let alone wife. Instead, she enters a monastery. Three years later, Little Phoenix impregnates her, with a son no less, so she can return to court as an official concubine. Intrigue follows intrigue. By age 30, Heaven Light has become Empress Wu. Since her husband lacks interest in government, the Empress becomes de facto ruler, consolidating power by whatever means necessary, convinced that she acts for the nation’s good. When Little Phoenix dies, she’s 52. Her oldest son has died; another has been banished for attempting a coup against his father; and the third happily turns power over to his mother. She becomes Supreme Empress, ruling with an iron hand, but also introducing reforms. Deified by the people as Eternal Empress August Sovereign Divinity, at the end of her long life she acknowledges to herself that she has been “a usurper” who forged the divine messages that legitimized her power.
A compelling read and surprisingly easy to follow, given its exotic complexity.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-081758-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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by Shan Sa & translated by Adriana Hunter
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by Shan Sa & translated by Adriana Hunter
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
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
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