Brothers: A Novel [Hardcover]

Da Chen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 19, 2006

At the height of China’s Cultural Revolution a powerful general fathered two sons. Tan was born to the general’s wife and into a life of comfort and luxury. His half brother, Shento, was born to the general’s mistress, who threw herself off a cliff in the mountains of Balan only moments after delivering her child. Growing up, each remained ignorant of the other’s existence. In Beijing, Tan enjoyed the best schools, the finest clothes, and the prettiest girls. Shento was raised on the mountainside by an old healer and his wife until their deaths landed him in an orphanage, where he was always hungry, alone, and frightened. Though on divergent roads, each brother is driven by a passionate desire—one to glorify his father, the other to seek revenge against him.

Separated by distance and opportunity, Tan and Shento follow the paths that lie before them, while unknowingly falling in love with the same woman and moving toward the explosive moment when their fates finally merge.

Brothers, by bestselling memoirist Da Chen, is a sprawling, dynamic family saga, complete with assassinations, love affairs, narrowly missed opportunities, and the ineluctable fulfillment of destiny.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed memoirist Chen (Colors of the Mountain) draws on his experiences growing up during the Cultural Revolution for this arresting novel about two brothers negotiating the momentous changes that have buffeted China in recent decades. The protagonists are half-brothers: Tan, the privileged, legitimate heir of Gen. Ding Long, and Shento, the general's abandoned bastard child. While Tan is "groomed to be a leader," Shento is placed in a hellish orphanage where he plots revenge. Shento eventually escapes, joins the army and rises to the head of the president's security detail. Meanwhile, caught on the wrong side of the changes sweeping China following Chairman Mao's death, Tan's family is discredited and flees to their ancestral home in the south where Tan builds an economic empire. Tan also falls in love with the beautiful orphan, Sumi Wo, who has an illegitimate son by Shento. When Sumi and Tan become involved in the pro-democracy movement, they attract official attention, putting the estranged brothers on paths that will converge at Tiananmen Square. Chen's inventive and sprawling family saga eloquently recreates a time of enormous upheaval. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Teens looking for a grand saga in which to lose themselves will appreciate this one set in late-20th-century China. General Long, well-respected by Chairman Mao, has two sons. Tan is born to his wife, and into a life of privilege; Shento is born to a rural mountain woman who commits suicide at his birth. This childs life is full of depravation and cruelty, especially during his time in an orphanage. As the boys mature, Shento learns the identity of his father, but when he is rejected, he vows revenge. As the boys grow up, their paths cross, although sometimes unknowingly. Shento trains as an assassin and during the Cultural Revolution he kills Tans teacher. Shento is the first to meet Sumi and fall in love with her. Later, believing Shento is dead, she falls in love with Tan. Despite its sprawling nature, the novel is fast-paced, with chapters alternating among the characters, thus eliciting both sympathy and antipathy for each brother as he meets lifes challenges. As in Dickens, the numerous coincidences do not detract from the tale, but instead infuse it with a sense of inevitability. This story of revenge, adventure, and an explosive love triangle satisfies a taste for historical fiction as well as for a family saga.–Teri Titus, San Mateo County Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books; First Edition first Printing edition (September 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400097282
• ISBN-13: 978-1400097289
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,042,635 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cain and Abel head East, December 21, 2006

By 

Liisa Fong (Taipei, Taiwan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brothers: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

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

By 

Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brothers: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad History, Worse Fiction, February 19, 2007

By 

Randall Green (Grand Haven, Michigan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brothers: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.