It’s tempting to greedily gobble up this slim coming-of-age narrative, much like the chive dumplings its heroine cannot get...
Peasant girl leaves her rural Chinese village for a fresh start in bustling Beijing.
Appalled at the thought of farming sweet potatoes for the rest of her life, feisty 17-year-old Fenfang Wang cuts out from tiny Ginger Hill Village the first chance she gets, with a head full of big-city dreams. Arriving in Beijing after a three-day train ride, she drifts through a series of menial jobs and just as many cheap apartments before finding an offbeat kind of success as a movie extra. Along the way she cohabits with a needy young man, Xiaolin, and his family, before falling for American student Ben. Dating Ben gets her kicked out of yet another flat, but it is actually her individualist nature that gives her the most trouble. She’s hardly a good communist, and the China she describes is one at odds with itself, with wealth and development clashing with old-school Maoist values. There’s lots of food too. Fenfang’s appetite, true to the title of this series of interconnected stories, is an impressive thing, and finding enough to eat is a recurring theme. In one of the more poignant stories, she goes back to visit her aging, taciturn parents, who have—in hopes of pleasing their daughter—invested in a big modern TV jarringly out of place in their humble surroundings. Enamored with films yet tired of anonymous walk-on roles, Fenfang eventually begins writing stories of her own, desiring to “meet characters who would climb up my pen.” The writing, it turns out, feeds her soul as well. Boasting startling frankness and streetwise slang, Xiaolu Guo’s latest effort (A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, 2007, etc.) offers an insider’s view of what it means to be young in modern Beijing.
It’s tempting to greedily gobble up this slim coming-of-age narrative, much like the chive dumplings its heroine cannot get enough of.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52592-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
