The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.Reading this book made me want two things: to visit China and to not eat anything at all while I'm in China. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. Sure it's his and not yours? To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.Review the book, not the reputation. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere.
Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis. Give him enough direct quotation-at least one extended passage-of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt. The Price of Silence by Kate WilhelmMass Market P.ġ.Movie Dude Weekend, Contamination and Space Odyssey.This is a story about family, the living, the dead, and the connections they share. To see such depth and progression in several characters is wonderful. The characters at the beginning are not the same as those at the end.
At first I had trouble getting interested in Kwan's Miss Banner stories but soon I was looking forward to what would happen next. Her gift of telling complex, compelling stories is outstanding.
She is also sometimes quite funny in The Hundred Secret Senses. And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.Īmy Tan is a wonderful, gifted writer. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."Įven as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li.
Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. The Hundred Secret Senses is an exultant novel about China and America, love and loyalty, the identities we invent and the true selves we discover along the way.
0 kommentar(er)
