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 Yorker staff 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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