17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cain and Abel head East, December 21, 2006
This book was recommended to me by another long-term expatriate living in Asia. The story line follows the lives of two half brothers; one legitimate, the other not. Against the backdrop of drama and political finagaling of the cultural revolution we follow Shento and Tan as their lives, loves, fortunes and failures become ever more intertwined - culminating with the massacre at Tiananmen Square.
At times I felt like I was reading a feel-good romance novel where all the characters were the best and the brightest and always overcame the worst possible obstacles. However, what struck a chord with me most was how accurately Chen evoked the total helplessness many less-favored Chinese must have felt - and still feel in China today. His background portrayal of the politics, corruption and the use and abuse of power was most fascinating - and painful. Overall this is an interesting story. My friend and I will definitely sit down and find plenty to discuss - both the story line and the politics. Younger readers beware - in addition to casualties of war, this book contains rape, murder and disfigurement.
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Preposterous Fairy Tale of Post-Mao China, February 10, 2007
With his first novel BROTHERS, successful memoirist of the Cultural Revolution Da Chen not only fails to join the ranks of his Chinese literary brothers and sisters (Ha Jin, Ma Jian, Hong Ying, Su Tong, Dai Sijie, Gao Xingjian, Anchee Min, Yan Geling), he positively embarrasses both them and himself. Drawing upon every hackneyed and clichéd story line imaginable, Da Chen leans on wildly improbable plot devices and absurd coincidences to create a story that ostensibly mirrors the explosive awakening and growth of China since Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Two brothers are born of the same military commander father: Tan into the wealthy and powerful Long (translation - dragon) family in Beijing, and Shento out of wedlock to a young village woman who kills herself at the moment of her son's birth, improbably giving birth even as she jumps off a cliff. The half-brothers follow their separate, excessively extraordinary destinies, each rocketing upward through different sides of Chinese dynasty. Tan follows the path of the great Ming and Qing dynasty lions - scholarship, business, and cultivation (in this case, literary culture), while Shento (a curiously Japanese-sounding name) rises through the ranks of the military and government. Their paths are not entirely parallel, however, as they periodically and unknowingly intersect at two points, both having to do with women. In particular, they are both captured by love in the form of Sumi Wo, an orphan like Shento who, in addition to being portrayed as an equal to the famous historical Four Beauties of Chinese culture, soon reveals her own improbably amazing intellect and an even more unbelievable talent as a writer. Sumi Wo serves as the nexus of Tan's and Shento's fate, drawing them inevitably closer and closer to one another until they finally realize each other's interest in the same woman.
At this culmination of countless absurd plot manipulations and unlikely coincidences, the story devolves into a vengeful love triangle, even as both brothers' careers continue their meteoric rise. Without revealing the details, suffice to say that Shento's career path reaches patently ridiculous levels in a story line worthy of a teenaged fantasist. Not content to leave this silliness alone, Da Chen manages to insert his brotherly protagonists as principle players in the June, 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement and associated massacre. By the end of the book, Tan's elderly grandfather is reduced to sounding like an American high school kid while the two brothers have materialized enough multimillions to exist in astonishing physical comfort as they contemplate the mess they've left behind and the lives they've ruined. It's nothing more than comic book characters injected into a comic book version of post-Mao Chinese history.
The morals of this story are patently simple - the importance of family, the corrupting effects of absolute power, the power of love to blind, the virtues of democracy, sacrificing the self for a noble cause, and the redemptive power of returning to one's humble roots. Da Chen's writing is perfunctory at best and his character development and sense of place are superficial. He alludes to actual personages - Mao, Liu Shaoqi, and Ronald Reagan - but thinly disguises Deng Xiao Ping as Heng Tu. Additionally, he devises a peculiar mixture of Anglicized Chinese names, using modern pinyin for Beijing, Yangzhou, and Fujian but older style English transliteration for Qunming (Kunming) and the Ch'ing (Qing) Dynasty, and Liu Shao-ch'i (Liu Shaoqi).
This mix of Horatio Alger, Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, and The Prince and the Pauper might actually have worked in its own peculiarly escapist way. However, by inserting the story into the real context of Deng Xiao Ping (herein named Heng Tu) and the tragic internal discord of Tiananmen Square in 1986, BROTHERS becomes a farcical imposition on real events. There is nothing of sufficient note in Da Chen's writing ability, nor in his depiction of the awakening China, to compensate for the supreme inanity of this story line and set of main characters. In the final analysis, BROTHERS is little more than a fairy tale set in a fairy tale version of China. I give it a rating of 2 Stars more out of regard for the author's earlier memoirs (COLORS OF THE MOUNTAIN and SOUNDS OF THE RIVER) than out of the merits of this particular endeavor.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bad History, Worse Fiction, February 19, 2007
I can't remember the last time a novel disappointed me as thoroughly as "Brothers". I was almost willing to overlook the contrived characterizations and their lack of depth, but I couldn't get past the sloppy history. Mao actually had four wives, not three, and the notion that he was grooming a successor is ridiculous. Mao's only concern for China was staying in power, and he couldn't have been less concerned about what would happen after his death. To top it all off, Chen portrays Vietnam and China at war in 1972, when both were allies fending off the U.S. in Southeast Asia. China's falling out with Vietnam actually took place in 1979, as a result of Vietnamese attempts to expand into Cambodia. Serious errors like this made finishing "Brothers" impossible for me.
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