Sagas to Read

If you’ve been searching for something different, with a challenge to understand a completely different culture----then look no further.  The two books in my column today will offer all that and more. 

"Brothers," by bestselling memoirist Da Chen, is a sprawling, dynamic family saga, complete with assassinations, love affairs, narrowly missed opportunities, and the ineluctable fulfillment of destiny. This is a book that is fantastic in every sense of the word--a saga of China that is at once exotic and universal, an epic tale of destiny entwined with history. The description of Shento's birth is one of the most original beginnings of a novel I have ever read, and it launches the novel with the generous imagination that is evident throughout. . . . Chinese family life, military tradition, and the steaming violence on the Vietnamese border are all depicted with the wide strokes of a great artist creating a timeless tale.

"Brothers" begins as if in a dream. And like a dream you are captured by its first eerie lines: 'To tell the tale of my birth, I must start not from the beginning, but from the end to my beginning. I was born twice, really.' This is Shento speaking. His brother Tan speaks next. And an epic novel evolves out of their alternating accounts, with all the rich and exquisite detail you expect from such an artful writer as Da Chen. “He deals in big emotions: revenge, love (both graphic and romantic), torture, and fealty. He gives us China, from the ordinary soul to the ruling elite. He takes you from Mao to Tiananmen Square and then beyond. If you're in the mood for a good atmospheric read, you won't find a better one." --John Bowers, professor of creative writing, Columbia University, and author of "The Colony."

At the height of China’s Cultural Revolution a powerful general fathered two sons. Tan was born to the general’s wife and into a life of comfort and luxury. His half brother, Shento, was born to the general’s mistress, who threw herself off a cliff in the mountains of Balan only moments after delivering her child. Growing up, each remained ignorant of the other’s existence. In Beijing, Tan enjoyed the best schools, the finest clothes, and the prettiest girls. Shento was raised on the mountainside by an old healer and his wife until their deaths landed him in an orphanage, where he was always hungry, alone, and frightened. Though on divergent roads, each brother is driven by a passionate desire— one to glorify his father, the other to seek revenge against him.
           Separated by distance and opportunity, Tan and Shento follow the paths that lie before them, while unknowingly falling in love with the same woman and moving toward the explosive moment when their fates finally merge.

          “The Emperor's Children” is a richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune--about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their 30s, making their way in New York City. In this tour de force, the celebrated author Claire Messud brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.

          At the novel’s center are two young women and a young man, friends since college, who are now entering their thirties. Marina Thwaite is a beautiful “It” girl who, by virtue of her looks and connections, has been given a contract for a book she’s not sure she can write. Danielle Minkoff is a thoughtful young woman laboring in the purgatory of television and longing romantically for something better. Julius Clarke is frivolous, hard-living, and famously witty, having parlayed said wit into a career as a downtown critic but not much of a living: to his torment, he has to work temp jobs. All of these three revolve at varying proximities around Murray Thwaite, Marina’s father, an aging liberal journalist of lofty reputation and even higher self-estimation. It’s he who is the Emperor of the novel’s title. Soon Murray’s gravity draws a fourth satellite, his young nephew Bootie, an awkward, worshipful boy who aspires to become a genius and sees Murray as essential to that objective.

         It’s Bootie’s arrival in New York that sets much of the novel’s events in motion. He gets a job as Murray’s secretary and sublets Julius’s apartment after Julius moves in with a rich, doting boyfriend. He pines for Marina even as she becomes involved with the man Danielle had set her sights on, the elegant, serpentine Australian magazine editor Ludovic Seeley. And when Bootie’s worship of Murray turns sour, he announces his change of heart with a gesture that destroys the equilibrium the other characters—mistakenly or not—took for happiness. There are comedies that leave a book’s characters with whipped cream on their faces and comedies that leave them deeply, and sometimes painfully, changed, and “The Emperor’s Children” is the latter. Thanks to Claire Messud’s deft grasp of character, her flawless eye for New York’s social hierarchies, and her deliciously intricate sentences, her book also changes the reader.

Our fiction selection is quite eclectic.  Please come by some afternoon or evening and spend a little time browsing our super fiction collection.  Don’t hesitate to offer me some ideas or suggestions about our Library and its selections. We’re open seven days a week.  If we’re not IN the building, you can still sample our titles by visiting our website at  www.columbuslibrary.info .   At the website, I’ve got my very own page with book clubs’ reading lists, lots of best seller lists, other book selection ideas.