A warm, intellectually rich journey through several nations and identities.
A Chinese-American woman reimagines her parent’s flight from China in this semifictional debut memoir.
In this darkly enchanting book, Zhang interrogates and re-creates the turbulent life of her father, a Chinese émigré, and the last half-century of Chinese history—some of which she saw for herself while visiting the country over the years. Zhang’s father, whom she here calls “Wang Kun,” grew up in a country that was in thrall to regional thuggery, brutal Japanese occupation, and all-consuming civil war; by 1949, Mao Zedong had won that war. Wang Kun studied with two literature-professor sisters from a powerful family that he called “the Kennedys of China” and later fled the country by way of Hong Kong for the West. Zhang says that she spent a good part of her life “renouncing all things Chinese”; now, in the course of her father’s “slow but unstoppable degeneration,” she works to piece his history together. The resulting book is partly fictional, with italicized, imaginative chapters interspersed with straight memoir and settings ranging from wartime Chongqing to upstate New York. The photographs that pepper the text are useful and create a scrapbook-ish verisimilitude. However, the book would have been nearly as strong without them, as Zhang delivers images in prose that are far more powerful than any photograph could communicate. One paragraph evokes the “thick plumes of smoke” moving across the waters of a devastated Nanking; another passage describes a pit near Gele Mountain, containing “94 bodies…bound with handcuffs bearing the inscription ‘Made in Springfield, Massachusetts.’ ” As a child, Zhang says, she had difficulty making sense of the different elements of her father—his charm, his temper, his formidable intellect, and the fact that he would nonetheless “play the Laughing Chinaman for American audiences” at cocktail parties. But in the end, through her exploration and self-described “embellishments,” she gives readers a real and unified man.
A warm, intellectually rich journey through several nations and identities.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-885030-52-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Kaya Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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