A delicate and exquisite success: Hong infuses real life with the drama and pathos of the best fiction.
A fictionalized account of a love affair Julian Bell conducted with a Chinese woman during the mid-1930s, by London-based novelist Hong (Summer of Betrayal, 1997; a memoir, Daughter of the River, 1999).
If it’s true (for media types, at least) that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then Hong has hit pay dirt. Her story, as she admits, is based on a real-life event: namely, that in 1935 the Bloomsbury scion Julian Bell (son of Clive and Vanessa, nephew of Virginia Woolf), then a 28-year-old Cambridge scholar, went to teach at Wuhan University in China and carried on a passionate affair with the novelist Ling Shuhua, wife of a university dean. The story is so explicit—both sexually and historically—that Hong is currently being sued for libel by Shuhua’s daughter on behalf of her now-deceased mother (Chinese libel law applies to the dead as well as the living). Legal questions aside, K, first published in 1999 in Taiwan, is a pretty good story in its own right, reminiscent of Marguerite Duras in its impressionistic style and obsessive narrative pace. The plot is as straightforward as any boy-meets-girl story you’ll find on the shelf, but Hong adds depth and shading to the bare bones of the tale by drawing on the background, offering interesting glimpses of life within the happy confines of the Bloomsbury set, as well as under the darker clouds of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria or the Spanish Civil War. The character of Bell, who comes across as something of a spoiled and callow child, is greatly upstaged by the sensual and contradictory Shuhua. And the translation, while sometimes a bit stiff and prosaic (“There was such harmony in their lovemaking now that they could easily synchronize their orgasm”), is mostly fluid and unobtrusive.
A delicate and exquisite success: Hong infuses real life with the drama and pathos of the best fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7145-3072-7
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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