Started: 9/17/2011
Completed: 9/30/2011
Recommendation: Not even for the bathroom
Recommended by: The quotation from the back of the book by Amy Tan convinced me to give it a try.
Review:
So, I had no trouble putting this book down. Amy Tan and I disagree. I plugged away at it diligently, though, eschewing most other reading because I was convinced that if I let it sit too long, I would not continue to read it. The writing was excellent. Some of the descriptions were outstanding. The plots pretty much sucked. There was a lot of character study, but it seemed to me that each story was busy expanding upon the basic character with which the story began. Some new and interesting details were presented, but, by the end of the story, I didn't feel as though I knew the nature of the person any better, just some more details in a made-up life. The plots of the stories didn't seem to go anywhere (and they probably weren't supposed to go anywhere) and that is a difficult thing for me to enjoy.
"A Real Darwhan" was a decent social commentary, but it completely lacked punch and was oddly juxtaposed with "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar." "Sexy" left me wondering if this was just one of many very similar stories about to happen to the same character. "Interpreter of Maladies" seemed, at best, to be a rueful look at some silly people. "Mrs. Sen's" was the most interesting story to me but the abrupt ending made the story feel uncompleted to me. I don't long for happy endings where everything is all tied up, but the character development in this story seemed to move the story along (it felt like a movie instead of a portrait if that analogy makes sense) and just as the story started to gather speed it raced off into a fog. I felt like the richness of "Mrs. Sen's" was a story that yearned to become a book and was foiled when the author's attention drifted.
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