More politics than novel. A movie version could be more interesting than the print.
A political drama set against the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam project in China.
Why Hong (K: The Art of Love, 2002, etc.) would choose to fight the damming of the Yangtze River and its resultant environmental damage by writing a novel is a question that arises from a reading of this one. Why she would provide an autobiographical preface explaining her own involvement with the Three Gorges region, then an afterword outlining the Chinese legend on which her book is based, is another. As a stylist, Hong is no W.G. Sebald, and when she creates situations that have environmental innuendos—a scene that takes place in a laboratory, for example, while a sandstorm rages outside—she telegraphs them as meaningful details, explorations of natural power to be controlled, and reflections of her characters’ internal sensibilities. The story focuses on genetic engineer Liu, whose husband, Li, is the director of the dam project (they have in common that both seek to manipulate nature). When Li, a busy, moveable target, uncharacteristically has a pretty underling deliver a large bottle of perfume to Liu, Liu becomes suspicious and sets out to track him down. In the process, she takes a trip back to the region of her youth, where she learns about the corrupt world of the previous generation, including her father’s involvement with the discrediting of his own friends, and perhaps her husband’s lethal corruption. There, she meets Yueming, poor artist son of her mother’s former best friend, who was born on the same day as Liu herself and who organizes protests against the high-handed treatment of peasants forced to vacate their land because of the dam project. In the end, the two approximate the legendary attempted escape of a prostitute and a monk who were executed solely to satisfy the personal ambition of Liu and Yueming’s fathers, 50 years before.
More politics than novel. A movie version could be more interesting than the print.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7145-3100-6
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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