A dry coming-of-age tale of modern Chinese history that nevertheless provides a unique perspective on an underexplored era.
Yang’s (Shanghai Girl, 2001) novel follows Mo Mo, a precocious mixed-race girl, as she grows up amid the turmoil of 20th-century Communist China.
Readers follow Mo Mo as she moves to a new area, meets new friends, acclimates to school life, struggles to find and keep love and finally grows into a young woman of talent, determination and resolve. The girl’s mother is mercurial and capricious and her protectiveness of her daughter is matched by her frustration with the constraints of motherhood; when someone who could whisk her off to New York refuses to marry her, and when her career stalls, she blames Mo Mo. The reader experiences 20th-century China—the Cultural Revolution, the industrialization of the coastal regions and the transformation of Hong Kong—through Mo Mo’s struggles and triumphs and the novel progresses competently from episode to episode. Yang uses the constraints of life in Communist China—issues surrounding job choices, visas, curmudgeonly authorities and curtailed travel—to demonstrate the hardships for Mo Mo’s family, who live with more limited opportunities than those American readers likely grew up enjoying. This gives the book a pleasing, consistent tension that is unfortunately undercut by the main character’s passivity; when Mo Mo discovers her father’s true identity, she reacts with resignation to the realization that she knew him, a moment that could have been more effectively mined for drama. The novel is structured as an Asian woman recounting her life story to a Westerner, and as such brings to mind Arthur Golden’s massively successful Memoirs of a Geisha, especially considering the similarity of the two books’ titles. Despite these superficial likenesses, however, the protagonists of the novels are entirely different. And while Geisha gave a delicately crafted look at the exotic, Yang’s tale is more relatable, but not necessarily as exciting.
A dry coming-of-age tale of modern Chinese history that nevertheless provides a unique perspective on an underexplored era.Pub Date: June 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461013419
Page Count: 216
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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