Veteran writer West (Tenement of Clay, 1992; A Stroke of Genius, 1995; etc.) returns, this time focusing on the knife-edge relationship of a Chinese daughter and her father with a Japanese whoremaster. Beginning with the Japanese capture of Nanking in 1937, West examines the delicateand inevitably compromisedrelationship that develops between conquerors and conquered as he tells the story of Scald Ibis; her father, Hong; and Hayashi, the invading colonel who controls their fate. When the Japanese soldiers trash her family's villa, the 16-year-old Scald Ibis is raped by Hayashi and his superior officer. As artist and intellectual, she finds it difficult to reconcile her past with the presentshe'd been taught by her father, an internationally famous scholar and calligrapher now off at war, that ``home life was a life of art.'' But for all her delicacy, Scald Ibis endureseven as Hayashi transforms the villa into a high-class bordello, the ``Tent Of Orange Mist,'' catering to the most depraved and jaded of sexual appetites. While Hayashi, enjoying his new responsibility, imagines receiving prestigious medals for his efforts, Scald Ibis's survival is paradoxically assured: Now that she's in a ``conduct zone devoid of codes...[where] even ethics had become merely decorative,'' she accepts Hayashi's plan to turn her into a geisha. As she adjusts to her new situation, however, Hong appears and uses his linguistic skills to become Hayashi's interpreter. For a few months, the trio exist in a carefully calibrated association, but when Hong finds out what services Scald Ibis must perform, he kills Hayashi, and is, of course, killed in turn. Only Scald Ibis survives, living to sue the Japanese government 55 years later. A terrible tale, vividly told, marred only by West's intrusive intellectual riffs and asides that have the effect of trivializing the unadorned truth.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80031-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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