Moments here of fairytale charm, but the air at such high spiritual altitudes may be too rarefied for many Western readers.
Romantic and spiritual love in ancient China occupy this latest (The River Below, 2000, etc.) from the distinguished Chinese author long resident in France.
The story takes place toward the end of the Ming Dynasty (early 17th century), when crime and corruption are rampant. One victim is our protagonist Dao-sheng. As a young violinist, part of a theater troupe, he dares to exchange glances and smiles with the beautiful Lan-ying, betrothed to the tyrannical Second Lord Zhao, who promptly condemns Dao-sheng to exile and slave labor. No matter: those few transforming moments were enough to convince Dao-sheng, a Taoist, that his and Lan-ying’s fates are linked by the shen, the most vital of all spiritual essences. Thirty years pass. The now-grizzled Dao-sheng is a healer and soothsayer who has been living in a mountainside Taoist monastery, and the time is ripe for another approach to Lan-ying. He travels to her city and sets up shop outside a Buddhist temple she frequents. The opportunity comes for Dao-sheng to minister to the sickly Lan-ying, who has been discarded by Second Lord after two miscarriages, forcing her to live in lonely isolation. The invalid remembers the former musician—they are indeed soulmates—and her joy over their reunion is as great as his. Dao-sheng restores her to health and to her former beauty. The contacts between them are delicate and restrained, climaxing with a joining of hands under a full moon, whereupon “the lovers floated into a separate state,” a phrase unfortunately banal-sounding in this translation from the French. Eventually, Second Lord, deathly ill himself after years of debauchery, figures out the situation. He tries to strangle Lan-ying but dies in the process, and she retreats to a convent while Dao-sheng returns to the monastery, sustained by his faith in their undying devotion.
Moments here of fairytale charm, but the air at such high spiritual altitudes may be too rarefied for many Western readers.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31574-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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