The BINDING CHAIR, or A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society. [Hardcover]

Kathryn. Harrison (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Random House, (1991)
• ASIN: B002PZAUSA
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Author Photo by Joyce Ravid.

Kathryn Harrison was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, California, where she was raised by her mother's parents. She is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers Workshop, where, in 1986, she met her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison. They had a first date on Friday, April 25, and on Monday, April 28, they moved in together. The Harrisons married in 1988, and live in Brooklyn with their three children. Kathryn writes novels, memoirs, personal essays, biography, and true crime. She is a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and teaches memoir at Hunter College's MFA program in Creative Writing, in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Probes deeply into the hidden abscesses of human behavior, October 18, 2000

By 

Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Binding Chair or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society (Hardcover)

Kathryn Harrison is one of those writers who make her readers squirm. And this novel, set in turn-of-the century Shanghai, London and Nice where colonial and Chinese culture come together. is no exception. The central character is May-li, who suffered the anguish of having her feet bound as a child. Married at 15 to a brutal sadist, she runs away and become a prostitute in Shanghai. She later marries Arthur Cohen, a gentle philanthropist who brings her into the opulent household of his sister, her wealthy husband and their two young daughters. Her niece Alice becomes especially important to her and their relationship is one of the themes of the book.

The story is sad, erotic and macabre. There is cruelty and passion, and a cast of fully developed characters who each have some sort of mental or physical disfigurement. Everyone suffers in this book and it's hard to read, but also hard to put down.

One weak point is the many the dream sequences which tend to stop the narrative. Another is the rather unsettling way it jumps back and forth in time. Also, the author has chosen to make the family Jewish, but yet the only thing Jewish about them seem to be their name.

Ms. Harrison is a writer with a fine talent and who is not afraid to probe deeply into the hidden abscesses of human behavior by using startling details to depict her twisted characters. It comes across as both disturbing and enlightening. I applaud her willingness to deal with the forbidden.

I recently enjoyed her 1995 novel, Poison, which was better paced and richer in texture. The Binding Chair, however, was perhaps written too quickly. This happens sometimes with popular writers who are on a deadline. Therefore, although I enjoyed reading it, I cannot give it an across-the-board recommendation although I do intend to read whatever she writes next.

26 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Shapeless and excessive, July 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Binding Chair or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society (Hardcover)

My first experience with Kathryn Harrison was the hypnotic Poison, a riveting, mysterious, tactile tale of the Inquisition. I have always enjoyed historical fiction; never had I encountered an author whose prose was so poetic--yet precise; we might not even know the names of the central characters, but we have, from the very beginning, an excrutiating, intimate knowledge of their circumstances and substance...and enjoy a narrative thread so taut it vibrates with each tortured, lyrical paragraph.

I have championed this author even when critics sprang up everywhere to defame her for her memoir of incest, The Kiss (which I actually found to be eloquent and restrained, especially as compared to others in the genre). I purchased The Binding Chair the moment it appeared in stores, and devoured the first several chapters enraptured. It was thus, with the greatest frustration and disappointment--indeed, embarrassment, as I had already recommended the book enthusiastically to several friends(including one declared Harrison foe)--that I watched the novel spiral into a deformed mess of sordid, irrelevant detail and vague side stories. I found most that most of the characters lacked both credibility and appeal, and their relationships were, for the most part, founded upon obtuse and inexplicable attachments. The narrative structure became less and less compelling, lurching back and forth in time and place as it labored toward a contrived and unoriginal ending...such a waste of what must have been a considerable research effort on Harrison's part...and truly disturbing to see this normally disciplined author wielding ill-defined excesses of anger and depravity in this fashion.

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tasty literary morsel with bite, May 19, 2000

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Binding Chair or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society (Hardcover)

I was completely hooked by "The Binding Chair." Kathryn Harrison has written a completely enthralling literary . . . I'm not sure what to call it. It's a mystery, it's a series of character studies, it is a study of the social mores of the late 19th/early 20th century, and it is ever so slightly rotten, which makes everyone and everything in it just that much more interesting.

May-li is a Chinese woman with bound feet who has married into a British Jewish family living in Shanghai. Her story leads "The Binding Chair," and the others swirl around it in vivid detail. There's her sweet Australian husband with his love of social do-gooding, a lisping genius of a governess, May's niece, who takes her aunt's encouragement too much to heart, and a heartbroken Russian on the Siberian Express. I didn't care for the ending, but understand it. I would much rather have had the book go on.