From Publishers Weekly
T'ien-hsin's impressive collection reveals a society's inner conflicts over everything from politics to sex, but especially identity. In "Death in Venice" the reader is taken through the creative process as the narrator becomes wrapped in his own story's mechanics. "Man of La Mancha" and "Hungarian Water" both center around philosophical inquiries into death and identity. In the first, a man worries about the mundane contents of his wallet, which prompt him to make mundane adjustments to what he carries. In the other, two men reminisce about the women they've known in an attempt to postpone and "outlast" the inevitable. The young narrator in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" spars with an older writer who is trying to understand the city's "new humans." The title novella (a rewardingly complex second-person tale) speculates on the reliability of memory as a woman revisits the changing urban scenes of her youth, leaving her to wonder "What is this place?" Goldblatt's expert translation captures the subtleties of competing Eastern and Western influences. The result is an accomplished and intelligent portrayal of Taipei's cultural evolution.
(Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Like her sister Chu T'ien-wen (
Notes of a Desolate Man, 1999), Chu T'ien-hsin writes formidably intelligent, erudite fiction about educated post-World War II generation Taiwanese. Fluent in Japanese as well as Taiwanese (Japan long occupied Taiwan) and able to visit Japan but not the mainland, this cohort finds cultural touchstones in Japanese literature and world cinema, which the narrators of the five pieces in this book habitually cite as they nostalgically contrast then and now. A writer searches for the right coffee shop in which to work, lamenting those he used to write in that have changed. Another writer nearly faints in the street, and the incident divides his life. A female executive becomes an authority on diamonds as she weighs buying one for herself. Two men develop an acquaintance based on recalling scents from their pasts. The old capital of the titular short novel is Kyoto, Japan, whose relative preservation a disillusioned woman obsessively compares to the constant change of booming Taipei. Dense, demanding, and quite possibly unforgettable.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
