Braised Pork
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2.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The dreamlike story of a young woman in contemporary Beijing forging a different life for herself, from one of our brightest new literary stars.
One morning in autumn, just after breakfast, Jia Jia finds her husband dead in the bathtub of their Beijing apartment.
Next to him is a piece of folded paper, a sketch of a strange creature from his dream. He has left her no other sign. Young, alone, and with many unanswered questions, Jia Jia sets out on a journey. It takes her deep into her past where, for the very first time, she begins to have a sense of her future.
'Startlingly original... A portrait of alienated young womanhood as it is set free' Guardian
'Rich and wild...it gets under your skin' Observer
'An Yu writes with style and in a way that is hard to resist' Sunday Times
'A seductive, sharply observed tale of love, loss and hope' Daily Mail
Customer Reviews
Hard to get into
I really wanted to like this book. It’s well written but it was just too confusing and hard to connect to. And the ending was very lacking. I ended up racing through it just to finish it.
Pork chop
Author Chinese but lives in NYC and writes in English, which sounds like the Clayton's version of Chinese to me. That having been said, her first novel this one), was the subject of a bidding war among up multiple publishers, and she ended up receiving a six (some say seven) figure advance for her first two books.
Thirty-something woman in Beijing shares loveless marriage with older dude, who tells her to pack for a holiday, but announces he's going to take a bath first. The thing is, the dude never takes baths. When she goes in to check, he's face down, bum up, dead, and there's a sketch beside him of a creature with a human body and the head of a fish. Our gal goes through anger, bewilderment and a fair quantity of grog as she relives her past in the quest for her future, magic reality style, including a trip to Tibet, which is a trippy place at the best of times. Too clever for me, with not enough sparkle in the prose to make up for it.