Nevertheless, it will very probably be another reading group sensation.
An unlikely hero resists injustice while introducing the interpretation of dreams to China, in this fey successor to Sijie’s hugely successful Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001).
The eponymous protagonist is “a Chinese-born apprentice in psychoanalysis recently returned from France,” where he absorbed the teachings of Freud and Lacan, and presumably the resolve to liberate his girlfriend (identified as Volcano of the Old Moon), whose freelance photographs of victims of government torture have landed her in prison, at the order of “the famous Judge Di of Chengdu, king of the criminals’ hell.” Sijie writes appealingly of gently eccentric Mr. Muo, who begins his picaresque misadventures as a 40-year-old virgin aflame with scholarly and humanitarian purpose, emulates Cervantes’s Don in his quixotic encounters with corrupt bureaucrats, formidable women (including a truculent policewoman whom he sullenly nicknames “Mrs. Thatcher”), roving sociopaths, the staff at an Observation Post where panda droppings are examined as a means to prolonging the endangered critters’ lives—and the all-too scrutable Judge Di. The latter is an unregenerate monster of appetite whose favor is susceptible to bribes, notably the offer of nubile virgins. Muo’s search for one of these endangered specimens broadens his horizons agreeably, as he surrenders his own sexual innocence while laboring to satisfy the greedy magistrate’s creepy demands. The story wanders as much as Mr. Muo does, moving inelegantly between past and present, relying heavily on flashbacks, and rather too frequently presenting major actions only in retrospect and in little detail. Muo—a little like Nabokov’s Pnin and the protagonists of Naipaul’s early novels—is a charmer. But Dai Sijie’s latest is a very rickety construction.
Nevertheless, it will very probably be another reading group sensation.Pub Date: June 13, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4259-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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