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50books_poc2010-03-30 03:29 pm
cyphomandra.livejournal.com) wrote in 50books_poc2010-03-30 03:29 pm
Entry tags:
24 and 25/50; Yep, Phillips
Laurence Yep, The traitor. This is the fourth book, chronologically, in Yep's Golden Mountain series - I read Dragonwings (set next, chronologically, but written earlier) years ago, when I was obsessed with fantasy (it was next to Jane Yolen's dragon books, and I picked it up assuming it was similar), and liked it but was grumpy about encountering only metaphorical dragons. Currently I am grumpy about endless fantasy trilogies instead, so possibly I should have gone back to these earlier - I hadn't realised until I picked this up that the series was now up to nine books.
All of them deal with members of the Young family, from their lives in China to their arrival in America, and through to near present day (the last is set in 1995). The Traitor is set in 1885, in a mining community in Wyoming, where tensions between white and Chinese miners are about to explode in what Yep refers to as the worse race riot in US history. The narrative swaps between Joseph Young, who resents his father's loyalty to China and what it has cost him, and Michael Purdy, the bastard son of one of the town's laundry woman, who is also an outcast; the two meet hiding from bullies in a cave that turns out to contain fossils.
Yep is good at showing how tensions become established between people, and how decisions made for one reason get used by others; he also doesn't shy away from showing what happens in the massacre (I'm actually not sure about the description "race riot", because it all seems so one-sided), and how the people involved don't think any less of themselves for having murdered the Chinese and/or stolen from them (there's also a really nice moment where Michael uses the self-opinion of one of the townswomen against her, to save his friends). I am a bit vague about some of the specific political backdrop to this (the Patriots, for example) and I also think I needed the earlier books to tie in with some of the information about immigration controls on the Chinese at that point, as I'm not sure if the "men only" thing represented here was a recent change or more longstanding in origin. Also, I want to read more about Otter, Joseph's father, who is great in this.
Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood. This book circles between two worlds - the Holocaust, either during or just after, with the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine, and Venice in the fifteenth century; the oppression of Jews is common to both (in Venice, the ghetto; outside Venice, a small town within which the Jews, tolerated but disliked, are rumoured to have captured and killed a young Christian boy for their religious rites). Some of the characters are connected by blood more directly (Eva, who survives the concentration camps, has an uncle who is in Palestine, and he meets there, later, an Ethiopian Jew who has not found a place there), but most of the similarity is in theme; prejudice, and the establishment of other.
The structure of the book is deliberately broken down - we start at the ends of stories, or in the middle; important details occur off-stage (in Venice the identity of the black military commander who falls in love with a white Italian woman is, although not revealed immediately, all too obvious) or before or after the narrative, and at a certain point the very writing starts to fall apart. Breaking up the narrative does not make it any less effective, however - in some ways, knowing Eva will survive makes her suffering less bearable, because of what it does to her in the process, and because of how she will go on being hurt when she attempts to make a new life in England. It also doesn't slow down the urgency of the book at all - it's a short, powerful piece of fiction, and it's very difficult to put down.
And it's beautifully written but unremittingly bleak. I've read a lot of good but depressing books recently, and although I've enjoyed them I wouldn't mind something lighter for contrast. Maybe I should avoid literary fiction in general (it hasn't been ending well for me for a while!) but I thought I might just take this opportunity to ask the community if they had any recommendations for this challenge that were a bit more upbeat, and weren't children's or YA - other genre is fine.
All of them deal with members of the Young family, from their lives in China to their arrival in America, and through to near present day (the last is set in 1995). The Traitor is set in 1885, in a mining community in Wyoming, where tensions between white and Chinese miners are about to explode in what Yep refers to as the worse race riot in US history. The narrative swaps between Joseph Young, who resents his father's loyalty to China and what it has cost him, and Michael Purdy, the bastard son of one of the town's laundry woman, who is also an outcast; the two meet hiding from bullies in a cave that turns out to contain fossils.
Yep is good at showing how tensions become established between people, and how decisions made for one reason get used by others; he also doesn't shy away from showing what happens in the massacre (I'm actually not sure about the description "race riot", because it all seems so one-sided), and how the people involved don't think any less of themselves for having murdered the Chinese and/or stolen from them (there's also a really nice moment where Michael uses the self-opinion of one of the townswomen against her, to save his friends). I am a bit vague about some of the specific political backdrop to this (the Patriots, for example) and I also think I needed the earlier books to tie in with some of the information about immigration controls on the Chinese at that point, as I'm not sure if the "men only" thing represented here was a recent change or more longstanding in origin. Also, I want to read more about Otter, Joseph's father, who is great in this.
Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood. This book circles between two worlds - the Holocaust, either during or just after, with the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine, and Venice in the fifteenth century; the oppression of Jews is common to both (in Venice, the ghetto; outside Venice, a small town within which the Jews, tolerated but disliked, are rumoured to have captured and killed a young Christian boy for their religious rites). Some of the characters are connected by blood more directly (Eva, who survives the concentration camps, has an uncle who is in Palestine, and he meets there, later, an Ethiopian Jew who has not found a place there), but most of the similarity is in theme; prejudice, and the establishment of other.
The structure of the book is deliberately broken down - we start at the ends of stories, or in the middle; important details occur off-stage (in Venice the identity of the black military commander who falls in love with a white Italian woman is, although not revealed immediately, all too obvious) or before or after the narrative, and at a certain point the very writing starts to fall apart. Breaking up the narrative does not make it any less effective, however - in some ways, knowing Eva will survive makes her suffering less bearable, because of what it does to her in the process, and because of how she will go on being hurt when she attempts to make a new life in England. It also doesn't slow down the urgency of the book at all - it's a short, powerful piece of fiction, and it's very difficult to put down.
And it's beautifully written but unremittingly bleak. I've read a lot of good but depressing books recently, and although I've enjoyed them I wouldn't mind something lighter for contrast. Maybe I should avoid literary fiction in general (it hasn't been ending well for me for a while!) but I thought I might just take this opportunity to ask the community if they had any recommendations for this challenge that were a bit more upbeat, and weren't children's or YA - other genre is fine.