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ALL THAT MATTERS

Name: ALL THAT MATTERS
Author: Wayson Choy
ISBN: 1-59051-215-4

by Wayson Choy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2007

A pleasant but unremarkable work of immigrant literature.

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Choy’s second novel, about growing up Chinese in Canada, is a companion piece to his prize-winning debut (The Jade Peony, 1997).

In his debut, Choy focused on three children in Vancouver’s Chinatown before WWII; here, he revisits that family, the Chens, from a different perspective. Narrator Kiam-Kim is only three in 1926 when he arrives in Canada with his father and his grandmother, Poh-Poh; they are fleeing famine and war, and the disintegration of China will form the story’s backdrop. They have been sponsored by Third Uncle, a prosperous warehousing merchant who finds them accommodations. Kiam’s mother died young. Father must not marry again, to avoid upsetting his wife’s ghost (“Ghosts and Old China haunted us”), but a companion is arranged for him, to be known as Stepmother. She will give birth to a girl and then a boy; along with an adopted orphan, they form the trio of The Jade Peony. Superficially, this is Kiam’s story, the First Son who must set an example, and who has an unusual best friend in Jack O’Connor, the white boy who lives next door. Kiam experiences the familiar adolescent rites of passage, such as the showdown with a deadly street gang and heavy petting with Chinese neighbor Jenny, though no actual dates, for they would involve older escorts (“Chinatown’s idea of birth control”). Bound by this web of family and neighbors, Kiam’s questioning of traditional mores is limited, even as he is upstaged by Poh-Poh, who dominates the novel; Father and Stepmother are ciphers beside her. Not only does she decide Stepmother’s duties, she inculcates in the children the significance of ghosts and curses (her own curses are legendary). Before her death, she tells Kiam the painful secret of how Father was conceived, and it takes a full-dress ceremony to exorcise her ghost.

A pleasant but unremarkable work of immigrant literature.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007

ISBN: 1-59051-215-4

Page Count: 454

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.