The Hundred Secret Senses - Amy Than

The Hundred Secret Senses
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Autor: Amy Than

 Wydawnictwo: Ballantine Book
ISBN: 080411109X
EAN:
Format: 105 x 170
Oprawa: miękka
Stron: 400
Data wydania: 2095-04-01

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In her third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, Amy Tan deviates from the mother-daughter relationship so poignantly explored in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen's God Wife to focus on the lives of half-sisters, American-born Olivia and Chinese-immigrant Kwan. As in her earlier works, Tan weaves the distinct voices of the two characters into a tapestry of pathos and humor, exploring their complicated relationship as well as cultural conflicts against a backdrop of ghosts, reincarnation and Old World superstitions. The novel opens with not quite 4-year-old Olivia Yee learning she is not her daddy's only little girl. To her horror, her father's death-bed request is that a daughter he left behind in his native China (from an undisclosed first marriage) be brought to America. Two years after her father's death, the now 18-year-old Kwan arrives in the United States and enters the reluctant arms of her American stepfamily. It is more than age that separates the two sisters. The puckish Kwan embraces her new family, particularly Olivia. But the brooding Olivia is mortified by her Chinese half-sister, and baffled by her unfailing loyalty and devotion: "She's like an orphan cat, kneading on my heart. She's been this way all my life, peeling my oranges, buying me candy, admiring my report cards and telling me how smart I was, smarter than she could ever be. Yet I've done nothing to endear myself to her." Kwan is one of Tan's most memorable characters, "a tiny dynamo, barely 5 feet tall, a miniature bull in a china shop." She wears a purple checked jacket over turquoise pants, decorates her home with garage-sale finds and has a penchant for buying an array of TV-advertised gadgets from Ginsu knives to slicers and dicers. She is a sharp contrast to Olivia, whose name she pronounces Libby-ah, "like the nation of Muammar Qaddhafi." Olivia is analytical, prone to dark moods and after 17 years of marriage, still living in the shadow of her husband's dead fiance. Kwan's most distinctive characteristic is her yin eyes, which give her the ability to see the dead. She tells her ghost stories only to Olivia, who dismisses her as crazed. But it is through Kwan's eyes that we gain insight into the rich, complex history of the half-sisters' heritage. In what initially seems like a separate plot running through the novel, Tan takes us into Kwan's other life as a domestic in the Ghost Merchant House of missionaries in 19th-century China. Ultimately, the past and present come together when Olivia and her estranged husband Simon travel to China on a business assignment -- with Kwan in tow. In Changmian, Kwan's home village, Olivia finally reconciles her relationship with Kwan and her past, and learns to believe in ghosts and the hundred secret senses that keep the past alive. This is storytelling at its most lyrical.

Książka "The Hundred Secret Senses"
Amy Than