Customer Reviews

The Coffin Tree

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

 

 

It's a terrible loss to Asian American literature (and literature in general) that this book is no longer in print. It details the migration of a Burmese woman and her brother to America as political refugees, and metaphorizes the way in which migration to the US and becoming a "colored minority" created a more abstract, and inescapable, refugeeism, which eventually manifests itself as imprisonment. The first half of the book details what nowadays is termed a "typical immigrant experience," in which the protagonist deals with discrimination and poverty. The second half of the narrative describes a descent into insanity, and as such, the writing reflects the disjointed and startling incoherencies that the rest of us usually associate with loss of mental control.

Written in 1983, when Asian Americans registered only a small blip on the American literary map, and describing an experience that Asian Americanists neglect, Law-Yone's work deserves another look.

[Just to help convince you...the back cover of the copy I have includes glowing reviews from The Boston Globe, NYTBR, Booklist, and The Nation.]

I really couldn't put this book down! I was from Burma too, and the way that the author portrayed the people and the relationships between them, and the sights and smells and sounds really reminded me of home, even though she really didn't get much into nostalgia (other than brief moments of them during the recovery of the narrator but still described very accurately the emotional significance of them. I think that is what the author was really good at...the emotional experience of the characters in the story, and the internal processes that happened for them. This probably explains the back and forth in the time frames, which one of the previous reviewer found confusing. Yes, it took a little adjusting to those shifts, but I come to see this as part of the narrator's experience being portrayed in the writing style. How the narrator shifts from one memory to another, from one reality to another, and the craziness of her experiences. Also, emotions are not linear. Memories are not linear. They come with them associations that trigger one thought or feeling to another to another, which was such in the story line. I do think they end up weaving together quite nicely as a whole, with the beginning really ending up nicely, and in fact leading up nicely, to the ending.

I'm also in the field of psychology, and to read these accounts of despair, insanity and suffering of being human, was really intriguing to me, and so very true, I think. Perhaps because I do come from the country in the story, I do get it. I get all that craziness and what it all means, and how it impacts a person. All in all, this is very well written. I'm buying her next book "Irrawaddy Tango" right now, because I enjoyed it so much! Most books I read, no matter how technically sound and artful in their literary, feel so void of the kind of emotion that evokes in this novel. It's been a while I've been moved this much from a book.

While this book is billed as fiction, I believe it is autobiographical. It is about a Burmese brother and sister who travel to the United States after a coup in Burma.

The story of their childhood is a hard to decipher fantasy coupled with cultural differences that make it all the more bizarre. Both brother and sister are mentally ill. After the sister's suicide attempt that nearly results in her death, the young woman embraces life. She realizes that even if her childhood was a fantasy that her brother was embracing, it was still of value to him.

Though the book was deep and delved into deep and mysterious places, it seemed devoid of passion, as though the author wanted it that way intentionally as a self-protective device.

Law-Yone's writing is so precise, I could practically taste the world of this young Burmese woman as she journeys to America. Her experiences and emotions felt incredibly real to me, and I had great empathy for her--though there is nothing sentimental about the story. A beautiful first novel.

The Coffin Tree was very confusing to me. The author repeatedly jumps from one time period to another and does not explain exactly what is happening at a specific moment. The characters are confusing and you have to read the inside cover to find out just what country they are talking about. Still, it is an interesting book. If you are the type of person who likes to pick apart and examine the different aspects of a story and place them together so that they make sense, this would be a very good book for you.