This riveting melodrama is the first full-length novel in English from the young Chinese author of the brilliant novella Raise the Red Lantern (1993). Cinematic vividness and speed are in fact distinguishing features of the powerful story of Five Dragons, an ambitious young man who escapes the misery and famine that devastate his provincial homeland for ``success'' in a teeming city (near Shanghai) itself endangered by widespread poverty, gang warfare, and Japanese military occupation, in the years just before Communism. Taken in by the Feng family proprietors of a thriving rice emporium, Five Dragons is seduced into marriage with its wanton daughter Cloud Weave, then later weds her embittered younger sister Cloud Silk. Prosperity and power ensue, but nothing mollifies this stoical antihero's envy and indignation; nor is there solace in the children he siresa brood of greedy, sexually voracious, murderous mutants whose rapacity reaches a feverish climax as the frail Five Dragons, dying, is overpowered by the worthless son who has coveted even his father's gold teeth. The concatenation of horrors is relentless, and the imageswhich make ingenious connections among hunger, aggressiveness, and sexualityare appallingly graphic and violent. Yet Su Tong's characters, simultaneously grotesque and realistic, are drawn with such intensity that we believe them capable of anything (``The men in our family are born killers,...the women senseless sluts''). Page by page, the novel stuns us with a sequence of hallucinatory, disturbing inventions: the savage beating of a small boy and the hideous revenge he exacts; the murders of several prostitutes, ordered by the enraged, syphilitic Five Dragons, the image of his ravaged, suppurating body rising up defiantly out of the vinegar baths that keep him, against all odds, stubbornly still alive. Rice ensnares, and outstares you; no matter how extreme and operatic its content, you simply cannot not believe it. Balzac and Zola would have recognized a kindred spirit in Su Tong, whose extraordinary pictures of the extremes to which human beings drive one another and themselves seem scarcely inferior to their own.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-13245-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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