A sometimes dense but always discerning consideration of how truth emerges across an impressive array of global literature.
A literary master anatomizes modes of truth telling in fiction.
First published in Chinese in 2011 and recently translated by Rojas, this study of literary representation considers how various forms of realism—and critical departures from them—convey a sense of truth. Yan illustrates his arguments with examples from a stunning range of authors, including Chinese luminaries such as Lu Xun and Shen Congwen as well as a host of notables from around the world, with special emphasis given to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, Kafka, and García Márquez. As Yan explains, there are “four different levels of truth” expressed in realist literature. The two most profound are “vital truth,” which involves the expression of a psychological reality beyond mere appearances; and “spiritual truth,” which strikes even deeper, expressing something essential about the soul of a character or culture. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is one of the recurring literary touchstones here, and Yan insightfully interprets the work as a seminal contribution to modern literature in its turn toward a “hegemonic, imperial narration” and its rejection of readers’ long-standing expectations about causality. One Hundred Years of Solitude, which also comes up for repeated discussion, is framed as a critical paradigm similar to Yan’s own “mythorealism,” a mode that borrows from both traditional realism and modernist subjectivism to produce “a truth that is obscured by truth itself.” Yan’s commentaries on the realist canon emerging over the last several hundred years are consistently insightful and often strikingly illuminating, as in his assessments of how the strongest writers, from Defoe to Turgenev and beyond, have continually shifted readers’ understanding of what counts as reality. Though some theoretical obscurity does cloud the text and a certain amount of repetitiveness creeps in, the overall arguments and individual readings are accessible and rewarding.
A sometimes dense but always discerning consideration of how truth emerges across an impressive array of global literature.Pub Date: June 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4780-1830-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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