Customer Reviews

Candy

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It appears that one of the publishing world's latest minor crazes is to indulge the whining, self-absorbed, oh-so-shocking musings of China's disaffected youth culture. Wei Hui's SHANGHAI BABY, Chun Sue's BEIJING DOLL, and Mian Mian's CANDY are the undeserving recipients of far too much attention (and far to much of the precious few translation resources devoted to serious Chinese literature) for books whose only raison d'etre is their ostensible shock value from having originated in mainland China. The formula is simple: write explicitly about sex and drugs, use a few four-letter words, get banned by Beijing, and get published in the West as underground novels.

Regretably, CANDY wastes the talents of a potentially good writer on material that's been said and done a hundred times before. Mian Mian demonstrates flashes of stylistic brilliance and acute observational powers, but the dreary repetitiveness and pointless trite meanderings of her story overwhelm the merits of her work. Her structural devices of changing narrative perspective from first to third person not only fail to enrich her novel, they actually amplify its shortcomings. Her main character, Hong, is just as boring and childish whether we listen to her voice or hear another character talking about her.

In place of an exposition of life in modern urban China, Mian Mian gives us a story of a music and drug culture centered on distinctively unlikable protagonists. Her Shanghai world is populated by artist wannabes, semi-educated, superficial, and over-pampered childen who would rather sleep and drink and go clubbing than deal with the real world. It's China starring Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson - gag me! Even worse, her story tells us next to nothing about Shenzhen or Shanghai (what other reason would anyone have for reading this book?). Change the characters' names to Cindy and Bill, and CANDY would feel like it was set in London or Los Angeles, or even Louisville for that matter.

Aside from its author being from China (although she no longer lives there), this book offers nothing new, nothing that hasn't been said before about the turgid, angst-ridden lives of disaffected post-adolescents who haven't yet realized they are post anything. Mian Mian's characters - walking cliches spouting tired references to Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain - demonstrate that present-day Chinese culture, the world capitol of intellectual theft and brand piracy, cannot even experience rebellion and disillusion with originality. CANDY is the novelistic equivalent of a pair of counterfeit Nikes.

At times, the book lapses into literary spells that are unintentionally self-parodying:

"Die in the prime of youth, and leave a beautiful corpse: what an intensely beautiful dream that was."
"The only meaning in my life was that my life was meaningless."
"Sometimes, merely getting into the bathtub would make him start to cry....He wondered, If the shower had eyes, would it be sad?"
"Never forget who you are (even if you end up having a lot of money someday)."
"The world was changing, and I felt as though I no longer had any heroes....I'd long ago stopped wondering about the difference between blue skies and suffering."

Ouch, ouch, ouch!! Speaking of suffering, save yourself the experience and skip CANDY. Listen to some Nirvana with an Alannis Morisette chaser, watch "Trainspotting" or "Sid and Nancy" or "Beavis and Butthead" and you'll get the same message a lot quicker. If you really want to read about life in China, try Chen Ran (A PRIVATE LIFE), Ma Jian (RED DUST), Geling Yan (THE LOST DAUGHTER OF HAPPINESS), Lan Samantha Chang (INHERITANCE), or any of Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Hong Ying, Gao Xingjian, or Ha Jin.

2 Stars for artistic potential and the hope that next time, Mian Mian looks further than her own navel for something to write about.

That bizarre time between realizing your childhood slipped out the back door and adulthood just sucker punched you. Mian takes the reader through this transitional period and sometimes left me wondering if she would live to tell the ending. Im still wondering how one takes such realities as love, death, music, suicide, depression, rehab, mental institutions, addiction, AIDS, prostitution, and forgiveness and makes you feel as if you have experienced them all first hand at that very moment. Painfully honest, euphoric, and absolutely breathtaking. This isnt just a "look at modern Chinese culture", Mian allows a front row seat to her soul.

This book was a sensation in China, because it depicts for the first time the youth drug scene in that country.

The main character of the book left her family at a very young age and lives a kind of hippy life in different cities in China. She jumps from lover to music to drugs in an unending circle, looking for some happiness.

This novel is a kind of diary but, unfortunately, it has no plot. As a matter of fact, the author added a number of scenes to the book after the first edition. It should be easy to add another hundred pages.
Into the bargain, it is a magnified example of what an author should not do: dozens of pages of expressions of her emotions. But that is not the aim of art (writing). A writer should arouse the interest and the emotions of the reader, not express his own. After a few chapters this novel becomes boring. One litany of lamentations is enough.
One can feel sorry for her, but one does the same when one sees real junkies in the street.

By the way, this subject had already been better covered in the West (W.S. Burroughs).

Two stars for the courage to write about this subject in China.

I found this book utterly insufferable! It features one of the most unlikable lead characters in recent memory, an admitted spoiled brat who lives off her parents or her musician boyfriend and expects sympathy for her drunken fits of jealousy when she is not whining about how "phony" everyone and everything around her is or romanticizing the nightlife and drinking and drug-taking of her screwed-up milieu. The excuse she makes for her immature, grasping behavior is that she doesn't know what love is. Yeah, and she doesn't know how to behave like someone more than six years old, either! Despite romantic entanglements, drug addiction, stints in rehab, and a friend's seeming infection with AIDS, there is NO character development and nothing that would lead to empathy with Hong. By the end of the book she claims her role in life is to be a writer and that makes everything all right--well, perhaps it would if she knew how to write, but she doesn't. Maybe the novel read better in the original language, but I doubt it. The prose is stale, the imagery is flat and trite, and the switches in narrative voice are jarringly ineffective. This book deserves to have been banned -- not because it is a brave expression of a youthful counter-culture but because it is a dreadfully written piece of self-absorbed egomania. It may be daring in China, but it is not quality literature anywhere.

I've tried to finish this book so many times and I always get stuck in the middle somewhere. The first part of the book is beautifully written. I've highlighted dozens of sentences in the first hundred or so pages because the language is truly gorgeous. But, halfway in and the story derails completely, it turns into a biography of some prostitute, the lovely flow of words is gone, and that's when I lose interest. Maybe I'll finish it one day.

I just picked this book up on a whim one day, and as soon as i started reading it i knew it was different. mian mian's writing style is like nothing i've ever read before. this book takes the normal sex/drugs/rock n' roll novel to a new level.

I picked this book up on an impulse a few weeks ago, and found it to be an interesting read. The style is about as easy to follow as, say, a Hemingway novel. It's hard to tell whether or not it's the translator who created that style, or if it's ported over somehow from the original Chinese text, but it's very interesting either way.

The story is either amazingly well-written or completely flubbed, I really can't tell. You follow the main character, a chinese girl named Hong (although her name comes up very little), through her life from the age of 18 to her mid 20's. It's full of frequent explanations of recent events, almost as if she's writing a sporadic diary. The constant backtracking, I found, is oddly unnoticable, and the style is quite possibly brilliant. As you follow the story, the character deveolpment is extremely real. So real that you don't necessarilly notice it happening. It's either really well-written, or she did it all by accident (which seems unlikely. :) ). Definetely something that the reader has to decide for themselves, though.

I mainly picked up this book to read out of curiosity for this underground pop culture that exist in China... being that China is seen as a socialistic, highly conforming society or else.

While this book may unearth anywhere from the pretty to the ugly and to the flat out vulgarity of the particular culture with honesty and integrity, I can't help but get lost in the plot, literally. The author jumps from telling the story of Hong, the principal of the story to telling the story of the lives of other people with no transition.

Also, there were times in the book where the author described feelings that Hong was feeling that took a page or page and a half to describe and much of the verbiage was poetic fluff. I'm not against the poetic form of writing, but if used excessively, it has the counter effect of confusing the reader rather than enlighting them to how the character feels. Hongs feelings are not at all complicated to understand, at least for me. But the excessiveness of words used to describe them become boring to me and that's why it seems the book never seems to end or at least it doesn't seem to have a direction of where the book is headed.

I enjoy the concept of the book but reading it feels like doing a dirty job. It's exhausting to figure what point in the life of the character you're reading about, where they are, who the author is talking about at any given point in the book, etc...

But if the author's aim is to write in a schizophrenic way to illuminate the main character's rationale in her midst of "drugs, sex, and rock 'n roll," I guess that's fine too.

Mian Mian made a MUCH better choice of translator than her fellow banned writer Wei Hui did for Shanghai Baby. Lingenfelter manages to capture something of the rhythm of the original Chinese without falling into the plodding pace of almost every other translated Chinese work I've seen. Sometimes the book just seems to be trying to shock with lurid detail of drug use and sex, but the main character shows hints of self-awareness and perceptiveness that make it more than just a fun racy read.

I couldn't agree more with the review writtten by Steve Koss.
"Candy" is a collection of sparsely scattered pieces of insight none of which are about the culture or any of the places where the story takes place. There is almost nothing there to justify its hype. Shanghai Baby (which is almost the same story as Candy) is better.
Try the works of Guo XiaoLu ("Village of stone" being a fantastic example of great contemporary Chinese literature), XinRan ("The good women of China" a fantastic piece of reportive material) or Dai Si jie ( Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress), or any of the writers suggested by Steve.