THE LOST GARDEN

Name: THE LOST GARDEN
Author: Li Ang
ISBN: 978-0-231-17554-8

by Li Ang ; translated by Sylvia Li-chun Lin with Howard Goldblatt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 24, 2015

An exploration of contemporary Taiwan through the lens of the past, this novel hits many poignant notes as it threads its...

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Yinghong, a Taiwanese woman, struggles with an all-consuming love for a magnetic businessman while remembering her gentle, unconventional father, who was imprisoned for dissident views.

In this novel, originally published in 1990, Ang (The Butcher’s Wife, 1983, etc.) contrasts a naïve young girl's relationship with her protective, kindly father and her later sexual obsession with a much colder man. Ang sketches both men clearly. Yinghong’s father, Zhu Zuyan, validates and encourages his timid daughter, helping her acquire knowledge fitting for a member of a gentry family. Lin Xigeng, on the other hand, is a regular in the seamy world of Taiwan nightlife and is headstrong and materialistic. He represents the new Taiwan, one economically on the move, while Zhu was caught up in the violent repression of the early days of Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. Yinghong suffers a lasting trauma when she sees her father abducted by brutish soldiers. Zhu is returned to the family because of his poor health and takes refuge in the Lotus Garden of the book’s title, which Ang renders in delicate, often compelling detail that also occasionally bogs the narrative down. Once the back-and-forth, past-to-present structure of the book is established, it begins to feel as if the flashbacks are mostly desultory episodes rather than events that develop the characters’ qualities. But in Zhu, Ang has created a character the reader genuinely cares about—we feel his warmth and intelligence, and Yinghong’s great love for him makes sense. Still, it’s the present-day story that seems more intriguing. Ang circles around it tantalizingly, describing Yinghong’s dreamy fall into erotic obsession with delicate precision and creating suspense with implications that Lin is a far darker character than he at first appears. This suspense doesn’t entirely pay off, and though the novel's separate elements aren't always woven into a satisfying whole, they're often written with such grace that they offer incidental pleasures. Lin is superb at writing sex scenes, and there are many in this book. She is also a keen observer of plant life.

An exploration of contemporary Taiwan through the lens of the past, this novel hits many poignant notes as it threads its way.

Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-231-17554-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Columbia Univ.

Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.