(urth) Amy Tan = Gene Wolfe revealed, pt 2

[Jeff Wilson]

Just finished _The Hundred Secret Senses_ by Amy Tan. Another intricate 
novel-length story  consisting of many internested and interconnected 
shorter stories, it again features a Western-raised female narrator with 
a close but difficult relationship to an Eastern-raised female immediate 
family member, like _The Bonesetter's Daughter_.

This time it is the half-Chinese Olivia who narrates her life with her 
decade-plus older half-sister Kwan, brought to America after their 
father deathbed revelation of his previous family left behind in China. 
Kwan is a surrogate mother to the neglected Olivia, who learns Mandarin 
from Kwan's incessant tale-spinning of past lives and "Yin people" only 
she can see. This device again provides an unequaled view into the Asian 
cultural mindset, especially when the outer action moves to Kwan's home 
village of Changmian later in their lives.

The inner action is again very much like one of GW's fantastic stories, 
with Olivia taking the place of the not-entirely-obliging reader as she 
constantly struggles with the ambiguities both of idiomatic Mandarin and 
  the possibly unreliable narrator Kwan who wanders afield into ghosts, 
reincarnation, body-hopping, time travel, war, religion, mercenaries, 
missionaries, prostitution, exploitative relationships, even some 
peculiar Taoist alchemy involving five apparent cloned creatures that 
make me wonder if there isn't a direct Wolfe influence on the book.

Nintey-five percent of the mysteries are wrapped up by the end of the 
book without doing disservice to eastern or western cultures, and 
hopefully it's not a spoiler to say this isn't nearly the weeper that 
_Daughter_ was, but still has four or five real tear-jerker moments.
Recommended for those who enjoy GW stories, but hate not finding out 
what's really going on.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >