If The Tiger: A Novel [Hardcover]

Terry Farish (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 1995

A Cambodian-American 'Thema and Louise.' --The New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Like Robert Olen Butler, Farish threads Eastern mysticism and the residual pain of war into a universal human story?this one of mother loss. Laurel Sullivan, daughter of a U.S. Air Force colonel, becomes bound up in the life of Chanty Sun, a survivor of the Pol Pot regime, after Laurel's car strikes and kills Chanty's niece in a New Hampshire snowstorm. Both young women are motherless: Laurel's eternal-hippie mother, Annie, who's left the family, makes chalices out of tin foil candy wrappers in a diner in Franconia; Chanty's mother, Rithy, was tied to a tree in Cambodia to starve to death for stealing a mango. Believing that ghosts sing to children to go away with them, Chanty fears that Rithy will call her 11-month-old son. So as radio bulletins carry reports of her father's deployment in the Persian Gulf war, Laurel drives Chanty to Lowell, Mass., across a landscape of laundromats and malls, to pray at a Buddhist temple. There, Chanty is found by her child's father, the war-damaged Kob, who has the evil "tiger eye" and abuses her. Loving and needing one another, Laurel and Chanty work off the peripatetic ways of the refugee and the "permanent dislocation" of military family life as they grapple for a sense of place, and of connectedness. Farish's second adult novel (after Flower Shadows) is quiet, sensuous and intensely moving.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

On the eve of the Gulf War, Air Force brat Laurel Sullivan lights out for New Hampshire. Her father has been deployed to Kuwait, her mother, having tired of the nomadic lifestyle, left the family some months ago. Driving in the dark in a snowstorm, preoccupied by thoughts of her scattered family, Laurel is involved in a car crash that results in the death of a child. Disoriented in the wake of the accident, Laurel allows Cambodian refugee Chanty, a relative of the dead child, to talk her into driving to a temple in Lowell, Massachusetts, and this odyssey forms the heart of the book. Chanty, with her spiky hair and elaborate eye makeup, haunted by her desperate life in war-torn Cambodia, aptly parallels Laurel and her own search for connection with the family. Elegant imagery and marvelous characters heighten this affecting novel's emotional impact. Joanne Wilkinson

Product Details

• Hardcover: 222 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth Press; 1st edition (May 3, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642159
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642150
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,695,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)