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El Don (2014)

by Mai Jia(Favorite Author)

3.28 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Destino

review 1: I liked the historical sweep at the beginning of the novel, the whole family set up of how Rong Jinzhen came to be who and where he was, the politics of late 19th and early 20th century China. It gets more difficult as he becomes the main character because he is so distant and the top secret cryptography makes him even more distant, and then it seemed like it should be over for a long time before it actually ended. Reading it was a bit of a decoding process for me, I guess.
review 2: I read this book based on a positive review in The Economist. Although it is somewhat interesting for its picture of Chinese society and history, I didn't think it was successful as a novel. There were strange gaps and inconsistencies in the story, and the main character doesn't re... moreally develop beyond a one-note character.Too much of the book relies on extended metaphors about code-breaking or the protagonist, and the metaphors were not particularly interesting or illuminating. After a while, one gets tired of reading "Cracking this code was like finding one particular star in the sky... The code was like a castle with a thousand doors, each one leading to a thousand doors..." etc. What was the code and how was it cracked, for God's sake? The protagonist's brilliance and personality were also communicated by these metaphors, some of which seemed strangely inconsistent with the events in the plot.Frankly, I'm not convinced the author knows very much about code-breaking, and the reliance on metaphors became tiresome. At some point, the characters have to establish themselves through their actions or words, and not from the author's commentary, which then becomes unbelievable. You don't really believe that someone is brilliant just because everyone says he is brilliant--you have to experience it.It is certainly possible that the translation didn't help much, but I feel that the basic structure of the novel is not what Western readers find successful in the 21st century. less

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