A major rediscovery.
Entrenched cultural values collide with rapid social change in this collection of the stories and novellas of the late (1920–95) Chinese author.
Most of Chang’s protagonists are young women seeking escape from the narrow paths of convention in which a patriarchal society has enclosed them. But there are significant exceptions. In “Jasmine Tea,” unprepossessing student Chuanqing, dominated by his wealthy father, his austere mentor and the latter’s capricious daughter (his fellow student), attempts “escape” from his imprisoning mediocrity in an impulsive violent act—which fails utterly to alter his insignificance and self-hatred. “Red Rose, White Rose” traces the sexual history of successful young executive Zhenbao, through a sexless first crush, a ruinous affair with an unstable married woman and acquiescence to the quiet wife whose endless patience and iron will put him firmly, unhappily in his place. The yearning for escape (a recurring theme) is satisfactorily resolved only, if imperfectly, in the title novella, a compact group portrayal of a financially strapped Shanghai family who subsist on advantageous marriages, and specifically of the mousy daughter (Liusu) who fashions a “victory” over the seducer who hesitates to marry her, out of the ashes of the events of Dec. 7, 1941. Chang succeeds brilliantly in the story of idealistic student Weilong and her eventual absorption into the lifestyle that has made her querulous aunt both a wealthy matron and a de facto procuress (“Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier”); and especially in “The Golden Cangue,” in which a houseful of concubines and their children enact a cycle of dependence and submission that will never be broken. Employing gorgeous spare imagery (e.g., “the moon was barely visible . . . a dab of black, a dab of white like a ferocious theatrical mask”) and a seductive tone of worldly fatalism, Chang depicts a woman’s fate as memorably as do Colette’s tales of La Belle Époque.
A major rediscovery.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59017-178-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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