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Kulkurit (2013)

by Yiyun Li(Favorite Author)

3.81 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Tammi

review 1: "The date set for his daughter to die was as arbitrary as her crime." So muses Teacher Gu as he wakens before dawn on the spring equinox, a day "when neither the sun nor its shadow reigned."I was hooked for the beginning, partly because I started reading the book on the spring equinox, but then because it was so easy to read. The stories intertwined in such a way. The shadow of Communism & cruelty of human nature overlapped with kindness, love and hope. I dare you to define the bad guys and good guys in this novel.
review 2: Remarkably sad, but beautifully written and constructed. Novels that bounce around from character to character, especially those this diverse though all in the same provincial Chinese town, can lose their story and theme to the structure. ... moreBut Li never loses the thread. And she ties it all together expertly. The bits of timeless wisdom from Teacher Gu are well thought out and well wrought. One might even call them Confucian. A few:"Young people should think about living, not about sacrificing. It's up to us old people to ponder death." "A martyr serves a cause as a puppet serves a show. If you look at history, as no one in this county does anymore, a martyr has always served the purpose of deception on a grand scale, be it a religion or an ideology." "Despite art and philosophy and your beloved mathematics and my faith in enlightenment, in the end, what marks our era -- perhaps we could take the liberty to believe, for all we know, that this era may last for the next hundred years? -- is the moaning of our bones crushed beneath the weight of empty words. There is no beauty in this crushing, and there is, alas, no escape for us now, or ever." Sadder, but wiser, as noted. less

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