Customer Reviews

Calendar Boy

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A few years ago, a Yale graduate named Eric Liu published The Accidental Asian, an eloquent series of essays tracing the young author's quest to come to grips with his Oriental heritage after growing up under the Euro-dominant influence of continental USA. That book now seems rather quaint beside the Canadian-authored Calendar Boy. It isn't just Andy Quan's value-added "otherness" of queer sexuality that gives this book more edge - although some of the bitchy irony that drives these stories surely arises from that. It's rather that Quan is a lot funnier about cultural disharmony, less forgiving of polite society and more aggressive in taking the piss out of PC earnestness. In "What I Really Hate", there's as much disdain for the cha-cha-cha-ing Chinese dancers as for the drooling rice queens. His take on fetishism is refreshingly inventive, as in "How to Cook Chinese Rice" and "Hair", and yet there's a haunting sort of beauty in the darker subject of a Japanese girl's attempted suicide ("Almost Flying"). With a disciplined, poet's eye - short, punchy sentences and well-rendered visuals - this book's a keeper (review originally published on Red Salamander's website.)

In reviews of this book, much is made of the author's race and sexual orientation; little has been said about his talent for fashioning words and sentences into crystalline, jewel-like stories. Quan explores themes of self-discovery and the search for identity among shifting layers and labels, and accumulates a number of exotic literary passport stamps along the way. This is fiction the way fiction ought to be written. Quan's prose is poignant, taut, and lucid: he finds just the right way to put things, free from excess, and achieves small miracles with this minimalist technique. ... his writing is so transparent, non-writers overlook his technical skill to yap about the politics. This does the book a disservice. Check this one out. Andy's a hell of a storyteller, and the themes he explores speak to a broad range of human experience. I had to get a friend to send me this book from Canada well before it was available in the States, and it was worth the effort. This is a writer to watch.

An excellent debut - I'd read Andy Quan's "How To Cook Chinese Rice" in an anthology several years ago, and it struck me as inventive, adventurous and very tightly written. This debut collection more than lives up to the promise.

Quan's writing is culturally aware and very smart, but also very playful and unafraid of quirk and humor, and throughout he creates worlds where a refreshing directness, and an occasional willingness to jab at topics most writers (or most gay men) would prefer to dance around makes each of these stories very tough, in the best of ways. The wonder of "On The Paris Metro," or the what-needs-to-be-said qualities of "What I Really Hate" are other high points - all-in-all, a strong debut.

I look forward to reading more of Quan's writing.

-David Alston