Not Su Tong’s best, but he’s always well worth reading.
The rise and fall of a callow adolescent monarch, in a strange, strained tale from the gifted Chinese author (Raise the Red Lantern, 1993; Rice, 1995).
Originally published in 1992, this is presumably an earlier work than either of those near-masterpieces. The story’s narrated by Duanbai, who ascends to the throne of the Xie Empire (in an unspecified time and place) upon the death of the father to whom he is only “fifth son.” Duanbai’s anointing thus provokes the resentment of his several half-brothers—notably older, more assured Duanwen, who will eventually become Duanbai’s chief rival and nemesis. Su Tong crafts a rapid succession of vivid scenes dramatizing the boy emperor’s proneness to impulsive decision-making and irrational brutality, his immature fixations on the dream of becoming a circus tightrope walker and on the superior freedom and grace exhibited by birds—while focusing on relationships that define and limit him: with power-behind-the-throne maternal grandmother Madame Huangfu, the gentle eunuch (Swallow) who becomes his closest companion, and beautiful concubines Lady Hui, who receives the Emperor’s love and incites the jealousy of his scorned empress, and her sister concubines. Duanbai’s inept rule sparks a peasant rebellion and leads indirectly to his dethronement by the victorious Duanwen. An earlier prophecy of “calamity” is fulfilled. The birds Duanbai has adored are carriers of a devastating plague. Exiled and penniless, he achieves an ironic realization of his boyhood dream, becomes an itinerant circus performer as the Xie Empire crumbles, and ends his days—as had his beloved mentor before him—in a remote monastery, pondering the ungraspable wisdom of Confucius. It’s all rather much, and its crammed, forced dénouement bears an unfortunate resemblance to bad Bergman and Fellini films at their most cloyingly symbolic and fey. Still, it has the energy of white-hot melodrama, and it’s a propulsive read.
Not Su Tong’s best, but he’s always well worth reading.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-6666-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her...
Love and ambition clash in a novel depicting China's turbulent 1980s.
Jin's debut is at heart a mystery, as a young Chinese American woman returns to China to try to understand her recently deceased mother's decisions and to find her biological father. Liya grew up with a single mother, the brilliant but troubled physicist Su Lan, who refused to talk about Liya's missing father. Mother and daughter grew increasingly estranged as Su Lan obsessed over her theoretical research. Complicating Liya's search for truth is the fact she was born in Beijing on June 4, 1989, the very night of the government crackdown on the protesters at Tiananmen Square. Su Lan changed Liya's birth year on her papers to obscure this fact in America. The reader is meant to wonder if Liya's father perhaps died during the crackdown. However, this is not a novel about the idealism of the student reform movement or even the decisions behind the government's use of lethal force. Instead Jin focuses on the personalities of three students: the young Su Lan as well as Zhang Bo and Li Yongzong, two of her high school classmates who were rivals for her affection. The novel shifts point of view and jumps back and forth in time, obscuring vital pieces of information from the reader in order to prolong the mystery. Not all the plot contrivances make sense, but Su Lan is a fascinating character of a type rarely seen in fiction, an ambitious woman whose intellect and drive allow her to envision changing the very nature of time. The title refers to the thoughts of a nurse, musing about the similarities that she sees between the Tiananmen student demonstrators and the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution: "A hunger for revolution, any Great Revolution, whatever it stands for, so long as where you stand is behind its angry fist. Little gods, she thinks."
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her ambition.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293595-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.
A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.
In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui’s diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora’s parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, “Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television.” The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the décor: “The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.” Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efraín sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: “You’re never late, never sick, never rude.” The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the “other.”
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4715-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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