Vivid local color compensates some for a disappointingly flat story with characters who are more concept–spear-carrier than...
First-novelist Lim (Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands, not reviewed, etc.) ambitiously explores racial, cultural, and gender prejudices while somewhat schematically chronicling the efforts of a young professional Chinese woman to raise her mixed-race child.
It’s 1969 in Kuala Lumpur, and an upcoming election is intensifying tensions between the majority Malayans and the minority but more affluent Chinese and East Indian citizens. Although newly married Li An and her scientist husband Henry are Chinese, both believe in a multicultural Malaysia. Li An teaches English literature at the university and dreams of becoming a writer, but she soon finds the outside world intruding in unsuspected ways. A best friend commits suicide when her Chinese parents refuse to let her marry the East Indian man she loves; a friendship with Peace Corps worker Chester Brookfield turns out to be more enjoyable than her relationship with Henry; and she meets Malayan nationalists who deride her notions of multiculturalism. Matters come to a head on Election Day, when anti-Chinese riots break out, a curfew is imposed, and Li An, who has been visiting Chester, must spend the night with him—with depressingly predictable consequences. She gets pregnant, and when Henry sees the baby, he leaves her. Li An moves to Singapore. Meanwhile, Chester, back in the US and unaware of what’s transpired, marries and begins university teaching. Later, after he learns that Li An has a child, a girl, he sets out to see his daughter. Li An has never told Suyin about her paternity, but she’s already endured snide comments from her classmates and suspects her father is a foreigner. Protective Li An is not eager for Suyin to meet Chester, but life gets even more complicated when Henry reappears and Suyin finds herself with two men who now want to be her father.
Vivid local color compensates some for a disappointingly flat story with characters who are more concept–spear-carrier than fully realized people.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55861-265-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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