Customer Reviews

Lessons in Essence: A Novel

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Rarely, a book comes along vivified by such an authentic aesthetic eminence that one wants to possess it for oneself alone, as if to reveal its beauty would be the betrayal of something profoundly true yet shocking about a beloved other. Such a lovely and unique work, rammed with life and ideas, is Lessons in Essence, the story of Teacher Li, sage and pilgrim alike.

Teacher Li, in late middle age, is a repository of Chinese art forms now mostly lost, not only to the contemporary mainland culture, but soon too to the buzzing chaos of traffic and commerce that have come to define modern Taipei. Yes, the visionaries who once visited the `cultural revolution' upon China are now graciously vouchsafing their own ineluctable brand of twenty--first century corporate fascism upon Taiwan. And Teacher founders in the throes of that nightmare from which only by dint of some new formulation of his humane and creative art can he possibly awake.

Teacher Li's internal running commentary, often at once dystopian and hilarious, recalls some of the interplay between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. It also brings to mind at times some of Thomas Mann (though without his [mostly] German influences) in its exquisitely precise rendering of detail; I think of The Magic Mountain perhaps, but also of Tonio Kroger.

Individual phrases are often an exhilaration: "... their collective locomotion in congested traffic assuming the approximate configuration of fizz in a soda can."

And this observation by Teacher of a young man and girl astride a motor bike and oblivious to the dangers of screeching traffic, made darkness risible: "You've got a beautiful girl with her thighs around you, and the best thing you can think of is to kill her?"

Also, the adversarial Dr. Gao is quite a stunning deft achievement in a certain tradition of charismatic I think, and further illuminates dithering numinous Teacher.

In general, plot is sublimated to leisurely, graceful character study and development, and there is employed a near seamless blending of past and present tense that allows the author to apply a mildly devious commentary not only without intruding upon the action, but heightening its effect. One feels at once charmed and excited by the prose, and chilled by the chasm of human wishes to which it often adverts.

I found several similarities between "Lessons in Essence" and favorite books by Kazuo Ishiguro, Shusaku Endo and Ivan Klima. "Lessons" is an eloquent novel of mounting desperation, occasional eroticism, intense inwardness, and a crisis of cultural identity occurring while Teacher Li's Taiwan continues to hang, tenuously suspended, between China and the West. Imbued with a richly perceptive voice and engrossing tension.