Tag Archives: Library Journal

May 1, 2013 · 8:41 am

The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino, translated by Rebecca Copeland

Goodness ChronicleAward-winning Japanese crime fiction writer Natsuo Kirino (Out; Grotesque) contributes to the latest installment of the “The Myths” series, originally published by Britain’s Canongate, in which contemporary writers retell myths. Previous volumes have included Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus and David Grossman’s Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Sampson.

Kirino here retells the eighth-century creation myth of Izanami and Izanaki – the original female and male gods whose union produced the Japanese islands – in a novel framing two sisters, one fated to become the next Oracle to serve the “realm of light,” the other who will serve the “realm of darkness.” Unwilling to accept her fate, Namima attempts an escape that damns her to Izanami’s Realm of the Dead. Readers will find echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice as well as Persephone and Demeter.

Verdict: Although inventive, the double narrative of sisters and gods – the former freeing, the latter bound to centuries-old history – never quite meshes, often feeling clumsily forced. Still, bestselling Kirino’s many devotees will likely provide a ready audience

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, May 1, 2013

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013 (United States)

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April 15, 2013 · 9:33 am

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

Five Star Billionaire* STARRED REVIEW
Think of Tash Aw‘s third novel as an ingenious game called “How To Be a Billionaire.” A how-to guide is interspersed with 30 rules that also serve as chapters, e.g., “Move to Where the Money Is,” “Always Rebound After Each Failure,” “Strive To Understand the Big Picture.” The playing board is Shanghai, that 21st-century city of limitless possibility; the power broker is the eponymous Five Star Billionaire. A quartet of players – all Malaysian immigrants – are revealed one by one: country girl Phoebe, real estate heir Justin, pop superstar Gary, and businesswoman Yinghui, who is about to multiply her success. Aw moves fluidly between past and present, creating a multilayered narrative about chasing, catching, and sometimes losing elusive opportunities.

Verdict: London-based Aw, who spent a year in Shanghai on a writing fellowship, has honed his experiences into a literary victory. Admirers of Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, which won a Whitbread Book Award (renamed the Costa Book Awards in 2006) and a Commonwealth Prize and was long-listed for the Man Booker, and Map of the Invisible World will clamor to read this, his best thus far. Fiction aficionados with international tastes will surely fall in line as well.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, April 15, 2013

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013

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March 7, 2013 · 9:50 am

Sandalwood Death by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt

This recent novel-in-translation by the 2012 Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, originally published in China in 2004, embodies a labyrinthine web of changing alliances and terrifying vengeance. Set during the Boxer Rebellion, the turn-of-the-20th-century Chinese uprising against Western imperialism, it features pivotal figure Sun Meiniang, who reveals in the first sentence that she will kill her father-in-law in seven days.

Meiniang’s husband is the town butcher whose executioner father is ordered to devise the most diabolical death (the titular sandalwood death) for Meiniang’s own father – an opera singer-turned-rebel-leader – who has been coerced into surrender by Meiniang’s magistrate lover. Alternately voiced by Meiniang and her four men, the narrative dovetails with passages from an opera of the same name, quickly gaining momentum toward an epic crescendo.

Verdict: In the wake of Mo’s Nobel win, his upcoming titles will garner greater attention. However, demand for Death might prove higher than actual readership, not because of a lack of quality writing but for its power to conjure the most heinous scenes of torturous death. Mo’s “Author’s Note” warns at book’s end, “This novel of mine will likely not be a favorite of readers of western literature, especially in highbrow circles […] my novel will be appreciated only by readers who have an affinity with the common man.” Diligent readers will also need to detach themselves from the gruesome machinations of Mo’s “common man” to reach the final pages.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, March 1, 2013

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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October 2, 2012 · 10:34 am

Lenin’s Kisses by Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas

Yan Lianke’s latest (Dream of Ding Village, Serve the People!) arrives superbly translated by Duke professor Carlos Rojas and auspiciously stamped with China’s Lao She Literary Award.

Welcome to Liven, a mountainous haven populated by the disabled who enjoy bountiful lives, so remote as to have avoided governmental controls since its legendary Ming dynasty founding. Liven – from a local word meaning “enjoyment, happiness, and passion” – joins the “new society” after an injured Mao Zhi, the Red Army’s youngest female soldier, settles there and becomes the de facto village leader. Half a century later, Liven’s citizens play a pivotal role in a county official’s ludicrous scheme to buy Lenin’s embalmed remains from Russia, and reentomb them in a tourist-destination mausoleum of magnificent proportions.

Reading this work requires physical participation of turning sections back and forth (e-reader not recommended) as Yan presents his nonlinear, multi-layered narrative in books, chapters, and essential endnotes – using only odd numbers. Notes Rojas: “[T]he work’s discontinuous numbering expresses the tragic sentiment of the novel as a whole (since in China odd numbers are considered inauspicious).”

Verdict: Sprawling, comical, and calamitous, Kisses is not for the faint-hearted (humanity rarely fares well in Yan’s fiction) or the impatient. Diligent readers will be richly rewarded.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, October 1, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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September 17, 2012 · 10:30 am

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

* STARRED REVIEW
Like his debut, The Gift of Rain (2007), Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng‘s second novel is exquisite and, like Gift, arrives stateside with Booker Prize longlist approval.

Recently retired judge Teoh Yun Ling has at most a year before she will lose all language and memory to aphasia. She leaves Kuala Lumpur for the highlands of central Malaysia and finds Yugiri – the book’s eponymous Garden of Evening Mists – where she’s agreed to meet a Japanese scholar writing a book about Yugiri’s creator, Aritomo, the self-exiled former gardener to the emperor of Japan.

Four decades earlier, in spite of being the single survivor of a horrific World War II Japanese prison, Yun Ling apprenticed herself to Aritomo, hoping to someday create the perfect garden to honor her murdered sister. Almost 38 years have passed since Aritomo disappeared, and now, threatened with erasure, Yun Ling begins to record his story as well as her own.

Verdict: Tan triumphs again, entwining the redemptive power of storytelling with the search for elusive truth, all the while juxtaposing Japan’s ignominious war history with glorious moments of Japanese art and philosophy. Readers in search of spectacular writing will not be disappointed.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, September 15, 2012

Tidbit: Since the review was originally written, Tan moved up to the Booker shortlist! You know who I’ll be rooting for! Stay tuned!

Tidbit2: Library Journal says Garden is one of four September titles “trending now that I don’t want you to miss,” writes fiction editor Barbara Hoffert. This review above gets quotes. Whoo hoooo!

Tidbit3: To check out my recent Bookslut interview with Tan, click here.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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August 15, 2012 · 10:22 am

Ru by Kim Thúy, translated by Sheila Fischman

* STARRED REVIEW
The recipient of international accolades – including Canada’s coveted Governor General’s Award (2010) for its original Canadian debut in French – this extraordinary first novel unfolds like ethereal poetry. The enigmatic title means “a small stream and, figuratively, a flow, a discharge—of tears, blood, of money” in French; in Vietnamese, it’s a “lullaby, to lull.” Made up of spare vignettes that flow through decades, this autobiographical narrative reveals a girl’s journey from wealthy privilege in Vietnam; her reinvention as a war refugee in Canada; her return to her birth country, where she is considered “too fat to be Vietnamese” – not because of her stature, but because “the American dream had made me more substantial, heavier, weightier”; and her own overwhelming motherhood.

Verdict: Interwoven with glimpses of cousin Sao Mai who was Uncle Two’s princess, of a father “who always inspired the greatest, most wonderful happiness,” of Aunt Seven’s mystery son raised by Aunt Four, and of young cousins and what they innocently did on the streets to survive, this is much more than another immigration story. For readers in search of intricate, mesmerizing narrative, Ru will not disappoint.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, August 15, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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June 15, 2012 · 12:12 pm

The Red Chamber by Pauline A. Chen

The 2,500-page, 18th-century classic, Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, is regarded as China’s most important work of fiction. Pauline A. Chen (Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas, for middle-grade readers) tackles the daunting task of adapting the revered original text, and her literary bravado engenders a stunning success.

Chen chooses three women to tell the story of the prominent Jia family: controlling granddaughter-in-law Xifeng, dutiful cousin-by-marriage Baochai, and naive granddaughter Daiyu – the only Jia by blood – who enters the sprawling ancestral compound after a two-generation estrangement. Chen well realizes “[a] woman doesn’t have any choices in life” in 18th-century Beijing with her future determined by family to be a wife, concubine, or serving slave, and thus imbues these women with rich inner lives.

Verdict: Fans of historical fiction who appreciate resonant details, unexpected intrigue, and multigenerational plotting will find this work irresistible. With just the right blend of highbrow literary (Chen’s pedigree includes Harvard, Yale Law, and a Princeton PhD in Chinese literature) and guilty summer pulp, Chen just might put this 18th-century classic on 21st-century bestseller lists.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, June 15, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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· 10:01 am

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Dung Kai-cheung, translated by Dung Kai-cheung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall

First published in 1997 – as an indirect response to the Hong Kong handover – Atlas marks Hong Kong native Dung’s English debut in translation. A self-described “verbal collection of maps” imagines the reclamation of a future city of Victoria (Hong Kong) through maps, memories, anecdotes, and legends in an uneven hybrid mixture of fact and fiction, history, and invention.

The 51 essays are grouped into four sections – “Theory,” “The City,” “Streets,” and “Signs” – and what begins as clever wordplay about maps as indicators of ‘place’ – “Counterplace,” “Commonplace,” “Misplace,” “Displace” – quickly devolves into lit-crit jargon – “Utopia,” “Supertopia,” “Subtopia,” … “Unitopia,”  “Omnitopia.” Most memorable are the (re)created histories of street names. Most promising is how “map legend signs enriched the vocabulary of maps,” at least temporarily.

Verdict: Although Dung “has been described as Hong Kong’s most accomplished writer,” according to translator McDougall, choosing Atlas with which to introduce his work in the West might prove to be a misstep. While readers devoted to intellectual engagement out of their narrative comfort zone (Calvino, Eco, Barthes, Borges, are referenced in the slim volume) might enjoy the literary gymnastics, most will probably not have the curiosity or patience to reach book’s end.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, June 15, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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March 15, 2012 · 3:26 pm

Flesh by Khanh Ha

Flesh, a turn-of-the-20th-century debut novel set mostly in Hanoi, begins and ends with gruesome beheadings. Bearing witness to both executions is Tài, a poor teenage village boy quickly forced into manhood.

In an effort to reclaim his father’s severed head and finance an auspicious burial, Tài spends the next year on an odyssey of discovery about his betrayed bandit father, their troubled family, and his own unsure self. Indentured to a geomancer who sells his contract to a wealthy Chinese merchant, Tài glimpses the backstreet Hanoi life of opium dens, desperate coolies, and the lawless rich … where his first experience of falling in love incites his own vengeful violence.

Verdict: Written in cowboyish twang filled with “yup,” “ain’t,” “em,” “gonna” – possibly meant to simulate the vernacular of the day – the novel never quite loses its anachronistic feel. One more edit might have trimmed some of the meandering passages and extraneous characters, but the fast-paced story pushes briskly to the finish. Readers who enjoy epic sagas set in faraway lands will find absorbing satisfaction here.

Review: “Fiction Reviews,” Library Journal, March 15, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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February 15, 2012 · 11:11 am

The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates

Handpicked by Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe for his eponymous Ōe Prize in 2009, Nakamura – who has also previously garnered many of Japan’s other top awards (Noma Literary New Face Prize, the coveted Akutagawa Prize) – makes his Stateside debut-in-translation.

Disguised as fast-paced, shock-fueled crime fiction, Thief resonates even more as a treatise on contemporary disconnect and paralyzing isolation. The protagonist – a virtuoso pickpocket with Robin Hood-tendencies – agrees to participate in what initially seems to be a simple robbery for a lucrative fee, only to get inescapably embroiled with the Tokyo crime world’s omnipotent power elite. Meanwhile, his last tenuous connection to society is a desperate young boy forced to clumsily shoplift by his addicted, prostitute mother. With nowhere left to run, the thief must barter his life with a labyrinthine test of his thieving prowess.

Verdict: Mystery/crime aficionados with exacting literary standards, as well as readers familiar with already-established-in-translation Japanese writers Miyuki Miyabe (Shadow Family), Natsuo Kirino (Out, Grotesque), and Keigo Higashino (Naoko, The Devotion of Suspect X), will especially enjoy discovering Nakamura.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, February 15, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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