A chronicle of lives of quiet desperation lived half a world away, understated and thoughtful, cheerless without being...
Generational novel of loss and miscommunication in a Chinese village.
The sins of the fathers are always visited on the children. Often mentioned as China’s leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, Liu (The Cook, The Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, 2015, etc.) writes of a simple tofu peddler who inherited the job and doesn’t want it. Yang Baishun’s father has only one friend, a carter, and even when it turns out that the friend doesn’t feel the same about him, Old Yang takes a forgiving attitude: “He shouldn’t have had to drive a cart all his life,” he sighs. His son also thinks he has a friend but does not, and so the younger Yang heads out to seek his fortune doing anything other than selling tofu. In time he has a wife and daughter, each of whom he loses: one runs away, one, it seems, is kidnapped. But by whom? The story jumps ahead two generations, and the same things are happening in a newer China: “When he turned thirty-five,” writes Liu of a descendant, “Niu Aiguo knew that there were only three people he could count on if he ran into trouble.” Run into trouble he does, as marriages dissolve, siblings vie, and the members of Yang’s bloodline look back into the past to ponder their mother’s disappearance years earlier. That mystery is in plain sight, for Liu seems concerned with other truths. Though he gives the storyline an indefinite air by not providing a firm chronology, he wants us to know that the story links two worlds, the old China of tiny villages and warlords and the new post-revolutionary one of party dictatorship and a command economy, even as nothing ever changes: “He had lied to her,” he writes. “It was only a minor lie that day. But he had started lying to her a week before, and that was major.” Friendless, untruthful, and unheard, his characters simply endure.
A chronicle of lives of quiet desperation lived half a world away, understated and thoughtful, cheerless without being morose.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7083-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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