The plot may be slight, but the author packs in wit, social commentary, and an emotional depth that will lift the reader's...
This slim comic novel, the first by acclaimed Chinese author Ge Fei to be translated into English, follows the travails of a likable loser trying to stay afloat—financially and emotionally—in contemporary Beijing.
Cui builds tube amplifiers for a living. In the mid-1990s, during a boom in serious music interest in Beijing, Cui did well enough to buy a two-bedroom apartment and marry his girlfriend, Yufen. Four years later Beijing’s interest in serious music has died out and Cui is struggling financially. Worse, his mother’s warning that Yufen was “a little too easy-come-easy-go” has proven prophetic: recently, around the time of his mother’s death, Yufen “sweetly” asked for a divorce because she’d become involved with a man from her office. Cui let her have the apartment while he kept a valuable set of Autograph speakers. He now lives in his older sister's apartment, but she and her husband, who moved into his mother’s house, want him out ASAP. Ge Fei’s depiction of Beijing life is cynical—from the pompous professor who insists Cui install only the best sound system but knows nothing about music; to Cui’s manipulative sister; to his friend Jiang Songping, a glad-handing factory owner who patronizingly gives Cui Tommy Hilfiger shirts and helps him “fish” for clients among his wealthy acquaintances in order to show off his “highbrow tastes”; to the general graft and corruption apparent in the author’s descriptions of recently built apartment complexes. And it would be easy for a cynic to consider Cui a sucker for helping Yufen’s new husband out of a jam or trusting a mobster’s promise to send his payment after Cui installs his most valuable sound system. But page by page, Cui lives by his own moral compass until readers find themselves rooting for this philosophical Everyman to overcome every setback Ge Fei throws his way.
The plot may be slight, but the author packs in wit, social commentary, and an emotional depth that will lift the reader's spirits like few recent books.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68137-020-0
Page Count: 120
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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