Customer Reviews

Monkey Hunting (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

From his village in China, Chen Pan, aged twenty, is tricked into indentured servitude, shipped across the oceans to Cuba, and for the next few years he will work as a slave cutting sugar cane. The year is 1857. Time rolls on. Chen Pan has children, grand-children, great grand-children. The story moves easily between the generations, between China and Cuba and the United States and Viet Nam, returning in the end to Chen Pan, now eighty years old, 1917.

There is no tightly crafted plot here, no suspense, no dramatic surprises. The book is a series of scenes, vignettes, from the lives of this remarkable family, their times, the countries where they live, social change, their loves and their losses, brief moments of optimism and joy, against a background of growing old, suffering, sorrow and clinging to memory.

It is a beautifully written, exquisite memoir. Author Garcia evokes wonderful portraits of times and places and creates engaging characters, using simple and lucid language. Once you pick up this book you will never want to put it down, for you will become part of the Chen family forever. This is a masterpiece and I can't recommend it too highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber

I generally prefer reading reviews than writing them, but when something excites or upsets me I want to share it with the world. Garcia creates interesting outlines of characters and, in my opinion, utterly fails to deliver them to the reader. I have to write a response paper on this and all I want to say is that she has no clue what she is doing and that it should be used as kindling. It's obvious that she can write, and some of the passages are beautiful and engaging, but overall the characters don't come to life and I am kept wondering - what on earth was the point of this book? Blah.

I love Christina Garcia and looked so forward to reading this book which may be why I am so let down. Typically I am able to get the entire picture from a novel, even if it is not plot driven - which this one had absolutely no plot, no character growth and no reason to continue reading. The concept is excellent, finding the descendents from one country (China) and tracing them through three eras and three countries (China, Cuba, and America)! Definitely a concept worth exploring maybe more in a saga type novel, not a 251 page novel where you have no time to explore the characters and their connections to one another. Not to take anything away from Garcia - Dreaming in Cuban was set up similar to this, but you had more time with each character and came to love and show concern for what happened to them. Here, you just didn't care because you didn't really know the characters. The linear patterns for all three characters went like this, born, shifted location, something big happens, death or in Chen Pan's case immortality. The something big that happened was also so slight that you barely knew something happened overall. There were no problems, just daily life adjusting the characters, again no reason to read. This is just my opinion and I may be missing the big picture on this one, but I typically don't.

After reading Garcia's previous books, which are exceptional, "Monkey Hunting" was a huge disappointment. The premise, a Chinese family living in Cuba through the generations, is an interesting one, but the scope is too broad. The result is that all the characters and events are one-dimensional. The backtracking between Cuba, China, New York and Vietnam in different time periods is confusing to the reader and the sum total does not add up to the same number as its parts. I recommend you pass on this one.

I read this book more than a year ago. It isn't often I find myself remembering characters in novels a year or more after finishing a novel. Other memorable characters I still remember years after encountering them in fiction are the protagonists in Lowenthal's "Charity Girl," and in White's "Nocturnes for the King of Naples." Chen and Lucretia in "Monkey Hunting" are still with me also.

Cuba had a sizable population of Chinese immigrants. This novel gives an insight into one such man, Chen Pan, and his assimilation into Cuban society while retaining his cultural roots and customs. The trajectory of the story allows us to learn about these customs and those of Cuban society at the time (19th century) through unusual characters: they're not charming, they're not funny, nor are they particularly heroic or virtuous. They're just vivid on the page. The same can be said of Cristina Garcia's most recent book, "a Handbook to Luck." She is a talented writer.

Being a Chinese myself, I found sympathy in the Chinese and African (mostly slaves) during the Cuban colonial period as depicted by Miss Garcia. I love history, Latino and Oriental things, among many others, thus, it was the main reason I have selected this novel, due to its Latino and Chinese flavors.

Initially, I found this novel was somewhat boring. It started slow, and many of the Chinese names were wrong and mixed-up. Most of the current overseas Chinese were originally from Southern part of China, with its original Chinese provinces of Kwangtung (Guangdong) and Hokkien (Fujian). These people mainly communicate in their local dialects, not the Chinese Mandarin language. Thus, Miss Garcia has mixed up some of these and also usage of Chinese pinyin (characters written in Latin.)

However, after reading more pages, I found that regardless of some inferior namings, the writer did not falter in depicting Chen Pan and his ancestors. The plot was intertwined with stories between centuries and periods. Chen Pan lived during the late 1800s to early 1900s. Whereas his final ancestor in this story, Domingo, during the Vietnam war era in the US and Vietnam.

Chen Pan was a slaved, who ran away from his plantations and freed up an African slave, who later became his beloved wife.

If you like romance and history, this is one novel not to miss. I give it a five-star, since I liked it so much!

Garcia's prose does not disappoint; it is beautiful and engaging. The narrative was less gripping than others by Garcia but I would still eagerly recommend this title.

In her first novel in six years, National Book Award nominee Garcia ("Dreaming in Cuban") explores the Chinese-Cuban experience across the span of four generations and more than a century. The novel opens in 1857 China. Impoverished, childless farmer Chen Pan, looking for work in the city, agrees to exchange his daily struggle for dreams of riches and adventure in exotic, tropical Cuba.

Crammed into the hold of a stinking boat with similarly tricked men, Chen realizes he has failed his duty to his wife and mother. Chen endures, but lack of food, water, space, and hope drive others to suicide. When a melon grower jumps overboard, "the furling waves received him with indifference. The melon-grower had been an orphan and a bachelor. No destiny would be altered but his."

Chen is sold into eight years indentured servitude cutting sugar cane. He and the other Chinese men live as slaves among the African slaves, sharing in their beatings and body-breaking work. After killing a brutal overseer, falling in love with a slave who is raped and sold, and witnessing the recapture and mutilation of a group of Chinese escapees, Chen escapes and hides in the woods.

At this point the novel jumps to New York City in 1968 where Domingo Chen and his father are trying to survive on menial jobs after fleeing Castro's Cuba. His father mired in depression, Domingo lives day to day, chasing girls and sharpening his wardrobe.

Though Garcia soon returns to Chen - who establishes a successful second-hand shop in Havana, buys and frees a slave woman, Lucrecia, and her child - the riveting bond between character and reader has loosened and the novel has changed. Garcia moves between old Chen and his descendants - the granddaughter in China he never knows he has, his herbalist doctor son Lorenzo, who returns to China to study for 10 years, Lorenzo's sons, Domingo and his tour in Vietnam. The book is now more about the immigrant experience, the dreams, heartbreaks, the mingling of blood and traditions, than it is about one man or even one family.

Chen is a complex, deliberative character, a gentle, steely man with an edge of desperation who embraces his life with passion, all the more ardent for its depths of regret, fear, ambition and loneliness. Lucrecia, too, is fully, deftly developed and their love is memorable, almost heroic in its quiet consideration. But the other characters, despite Garcia's empathy, and the clarity of the spare, telling, vignettes, remain acquaintances. There simply isn't room enough in this 250-page novel.

But so beautifully does Garcia write and so dramatic are the times and crises she portrays, that this is almost a quibble. She brings alive a thought-provoking world of change, culture, dreams and cross-culture melding. The novel will grip you even if its individuals don't.

Cristina Garcia gathers the Cuban-Chinese experience up in her graceful embrace in this lovely novel that covers more than a century and a familys adventures in Cuba, China, the US, and Vietnam. This is a slim book to take in so much, and I was left wanting more, more, more.

Garcia is an elegant writer who creates characters you immediately like and care about, and then doesnt give you enough to leave you happy. The most satisfying section of Monkey Hunting is the first part, where Chen Pan leaves his village to make his way in the world. He ends up a slave in Cuba, cutting cane until he escapes and through hard work and luck sets up a second-hand shop called the Lucky Find. He marries a former slave, and a dynasty is born. Chen Pan and. Lucrecia are wonderful creations, and the world of Havanas Barrio Chino is so filled with fascinating Chinese Cubans that it would be a pleasure to stay there awhile and really get to know them. However, we seem to be only touching down here and there, never lighting very long in one place. Chen Pans granddaughter Chen Fang gets especially short shrift, a shame because as a woman who is raised as a boy, becomes a teacher and a secret lover of women, and ultimately a victim of the Cultural Revolution, her story is certainly an interesting one. And what about Domingo Chen, who flees Castros Cuba to come to New York and go to war in Vietnam? A great story. Tell me more.

Monkey Hunting could easily be twice as long and still maintain Garcias high standards. In this shorter format she packs her prose beautifully, telling us a great deal with little. She undermines herself by being so good at imagining characters that the reader longs for more details, situations, and background than she seems to be willing to give.

My son needed this book for college. I was happy with the used book purchase.
Item was low in cost, had clean pages and was in tacked.