Customer Reviews

The Binding Chair: or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book is less than the sum of its parts. There are brilliant moments here, and Harrison is clearly an intelligent woman and a capable writer, but I also sense that she doesn't trust herself. And because of it her writing suffers. By that I mean that she opts for a fragmented, disjointed style of storytelling. She gives you a glimpse of characters at a particular moment in their lives, then, invariably, moves the story to an entirely different point and sticks with other characters for a similarly short period of time. Just when any of the stories are starting to involve you she moves away. She comes back to them later, but after a while I was very suspect of the technique.

I don't, in the end, think that it informs the story or is necessary to tell the story. Frankly, this in not that complex a book. The cast of characters is not that large. The plot is not that convoluted. The only thing convoluted is the story telling. There are times when this is called for, but in this book I end up feeling the writer didn't trust that the story was good enough, or that what she had to say about the characters sufficient. If the story was told in a simple chronological order would it hold are interest? I don't think so. And, I think, Kathryn Harrison didn't think so either.

This is still worth a read if you're a fan of Harrison's or if you want an intro into the difficult issues of 19th Century China from a female perspective. But I can only go so far with such a recommendation. There are, invariably, more interesting and poignant tales told by women of Chinese descent. Why not read them instead?

I enjoyed the first few chapters of this novel, but after a while the relentless shock tactics grew tedious. I disagree with one reviewer's comment, that Harrison avoids being political. Almost all the Chinese characters in this are sadistic and barbaric. While I don't doubt that the practice of wife beating, the torture of the girl in the marketplace and the practice of footbinding were commonplace in their culture, I'm not sure why Harrison couldn't have put in any positive aspects of Chinese culture to give a less one sided view. Instead we are left with the colonnial view that all Chinese at the turn of the century were savages and if that isn't a political point I don't know what is!

Harrison's prose is breathtaking and she is an enormously talented writer. However, my gripe with this is that the non linear plot did not hold my attention and the ending was a dissapointment.

The first 3/4 of the book was very enjoyable, but it was as if the author tried to cram a whole additional book's worth of plot into the final quarter, and much is missing. The character studies therefore begin to weaken.

I was terribly disappointed in the ending. Unlike some other reviewers, I did not find it to be inevitable nor even believable.

The title is deceiving: I picked up this book expecting a young heroine and a crusade against foot-binding. In actuality, the foot-binding seems almost an afterthought. It's used more as a symbol of the various ways people in the novel are crippled, physically and emotionally, throughout their lives.

The novel does not seem to flow--it jumps back and forth between episodes in different lives. Although all the stories are made to tie in together at the end, somehow it doesn't really work for me. Perhaps fewer subplots would have streamlined the novel and allowed the author's wonderful prose to settle more fully into the main storylines.

I picked up the Binding Chair after reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. I was hoping to read another excellent story about China and its customs. What I got with the Binding Chair was a 2nd rate book that couldn't seem to find it groove, let alone stay on track with the story. A disappointing read, I struggled to finish the book... read any of the books by Lisa See instead.

Mai is a young Chinese girl who, after having her feet bound and being forced into marrying an abusive man, runs away to a Shanghai brothel. It is there that she meets her future husband, Arthur, a man involved in the "Foot Emancipation Society" (dedicated to stopping the foot-binding tradition) until, that is, he becomes obsessed with Mai's feet. They marry and move in with Arthur's sister and brother-in-law and their children.

Reading this novel is almost like looking at a magnificent painting. Kathryn Harrison weaves her words together like a true artist. The tale jumps back and forth between "present time" (early to mid-1900s), when Mai is struggling with depression and her niece - who is closer to a daughter to her - has been shipped off to boarding school, to the past, where Mai's life story is recounted. At first, the jumping around can be a little confusing, but once you catch the rhythm of the novel, it flows smoothly until the surprising end.

If you're looking for a novel that'll make you think, pick up The Binding Chair and enjoy.

Maybe the best book I read all summer. This novel absolutely transported me - I couldn't put it down. It reminded me a little of _Memoirs of a Geisha_, another book I found myself rivetted to. Harrison's _The Binding Chair_ combines a good story, original and unpredictable, with good storytelling, making her language as sensual as the main character, May's, crippled feet and the soft, damaged skin wrapped in gauzey bandages. The shock of the book is equalled only by its subtlety, resisting the urge to make simple political statements or moral judgments, but revealing the complexity and complicity present in any system of oppression. Unlike, for instance, Anna Quindlen's _Black and Blue_, this novel does not turn out how you expect, instead turning this way and that in seductive narrative moves in every chapter. I liked it far better than _The Kiss_, her memoir, which seemed less skilled in handling controversial content.