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English: A Novel (2007)

by Wang Gang(Favorite Author)

3.2 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0143144383 (ISBN13: 9780143144380)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Penguin Audio

review 1: I think the best word to describe my experience reading this book would be "weird". The book would dwell on strange kinds of things (a visit to the men's toilet, for example) yet skip over important events, like a murder. Some scenes were presented in an over emotional way I couldn't identify with, while others that should've had deep dramatic impact were either quickly passed through or oddly restrained and understated. The way characters behaved (particularly female characters) and their reactions just didn't make any sense to me at times. I wonder if the translation can be blamed for this, or if I'm just unable to understand because I lack proper context or knowledge of Chinese society. I liked reading the book and it had some very interesting insights into what growing... more up in the Cultural Revolution must've been like... but it could have been told more masterfully.
review 2: This book is charmingly cruel, amusingly disjointed, illogically lovable. Set during China's Cultural Revolution (an event which, I obviously need to know something more about to make more sense of this novel in retrospect) it effectively sticks to the point of view of one very divided narrator and his weird friendship with his English teacher in a tiny cold town. At points, I found the narration frustrating to follow. It wanders all over the place, characters seem to act from mysterious motivations, not all is revealed. I also found the language to be clunky and disjunct. But then it hit me that that is what kept me flying through the pages and will stick with me for awhile. The narrator's character ISN'T privy to the weird evils in the world and why everyone around him is falling apart. He only offers his guesses and observations, and he offers them precisely as an adolescent boy would. I think this really got hammered home in Gang's Afterword where he dispassionately described in a few paragraphs some of the horrendous things he witnessed in his own childhood, that he found completely normal and even participated in.I think English is Gang's mini-confessional, and if it felt incomplete, I think he fully meant that many confessions are. less

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