Customer Reviews

Griever: An American Monkey King in China

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What, no reviews for a book which emerged from a tiny small press collective to become an American Book Award winner? Griever is a delight, a postmodern absurdist melange which offers a scathing indictment of suppression of human rights in China, and, more broadly, government and individual hypocrisy and the manner in which both big business and big government degrade human experience. Vizenor uses the common thread of the trickster in Native American and Chinese culture to present a fantasized version of his travels to China on an academic exchange program. He becomes a trickster Monkey King and all sorts of hell breaks loose. You can bet that the Chinese government will not be inviting Vizenor back soon, but I invite you to read Griever. It's a hoot! (Jim Dwyer is author of Earth Works: Recommended Fiction and Nonfiction about Nature and the Environment. Buy it here at amazon.com.)

This book looks interesting on the cover. After all, it has praise by Anthony C. Yu himself! However, if you look past the author's attempts to shock you with the worst side of China, you'll see he has more knowledge of Native American trickster traditions and only just a vague idea of the Monkey King. In addition to many Chinese language errors there are tons of places where he gets Sun Wukong's story just wrong! The most amusing to me being of course that he refers to Anthony C. Yu's "Journey to the West" translation, yet gets the author's name wrong! :) But it looks like Mr. Yu held no grudge.

The story is told in an interesting surreal style, but the plot itself is a rather cliched American man meets Asian woman tragedy.

All in all this book remains a typical novel written in the Mid-80's when China bashing was in vogue and reading novels about it was a favorite assignment of college professors. It may have seemed original in it's day and may have contained some truth, but in 2001 it seems as stereotypical a depiction of PRC as much as older novels that depict China as a mysterious, exotic land with an inscrutable population that knows kungfu and ancient secrets.

Vizenor writes with humor, sophistication, and captures the issues of Native American life, or more specifically mixed-blood Native American life in allegories that are akin to Jonathon Swift! Fun, and mind challenging!

Vizenor's book examines the interesting question of cultural parallelism, as he explores the similarities between Native American trickster traditions and the Chinese Monkey King tradition. Vizenor creates a wonderful double structure in which Griever's "Journey to the West" has two components--a Native American journey and a Chinese journey--and therefore requires that all the analogies to the Chinese Monkey tradition take two different forms--one for Griever and one for his Chinese colleagues. Fans of Journey to the West or Monkey should be interested in how he re-interprets these characters in light of the modern re-colonization of China by the West, while fans of Native American literature will enjoy seeing how he connects his own Indian tradition to its Chinese analogue.

It was touching but I was out of touch with it. It worked the cultural rift eratically-gathering static for occaisional shocks.

Though flawed in some ways, "Griever" is a uniquely challenging and ambitious attempt to link the trickster traditions of two very different cultures. Vizenor is obviously a kind of bull-in-the-china-shop when it comes to Chinese mythology and China in general, and his narrative represents a misunderstanding or oversimplification of China in the 80's typical of many Western accounts of that era. But unlike others in this genre, Vizenor undercuts the sincerity or innocence of his Western protagonist with a trenchant warning about the dangers of cultural imperialism and intellectual arrogance.