The Pagoda [Hardcover]

Patricia Powell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1998

A brilliantly original and exotic novel that brings to life the mysterious world of a Chinese immigrant who fled China in the 1890s to seek a better life in Jamaica--a mesmerizing tale of love, longing, and hidden identity. Jamaica is in turmoil--still reeling from the racial and economic tensions of Emancipation, which brought Indian and Chinese workers to the island from other parts of the British Empire.

Lowe, the Chinese immigrant, is in his fifties--the owner of a small shop in an impoverished plantation village, and the guardian of a secret that is gradually revealed. Writing to a long-estranged daughter, Lowe tells her what happened during their years apart--a tale of exile from China, of estrangement from family, of shipboard adventures, of an unwanted pregnancy, of the arrangement that was made to avoid a possible scandal, of the three decades of living as man and wife with a light-skinned black woman named Sylvie. It is a story of the destruction of a world: the burning of Lowe's shop. It describes Lowe's dream of building a Pagoda--a school where Chinese workers might learn about their history and become a part of Jamaican life.

Patricia Powell's rich and artful narrative  carries us to an extraordinary climax, in a novel that captivates by the sheer force of its storytelling.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Pagoda is the kind of book that revolves around a Big Secret. Give it away, and suffer the wrath of readers everywhere; keep it, and find yourself muttering enigmatic inanities about "the fluidity of identity" and so on. This much, at least, is safe to explain: Chinese immigrant Lowe runs a small village shop in post-emancipation Jamaica. Caught between black villagers and white planters and threatened on both sides, Lowe leads a tenuous, guarded existence. He marries the light-skinned Miss Sylvie, becomes estranged from his adult daughter, Liz, and has a mysterious, complex relationship with his white benefactor, Cecil. Then, one night, someone from the village burns his shop to the ground, and soon the various masks Lowe has assumed for survival begin falling away.

Granted, by the time the Big Secret is revealed, readers have a pretty good idea of what it is--but there are others to take its place. In The Pagoda Patricia Powell creates a world thick with sex and secrets and tropical smells, in prose that is by turns lyrical and claustrophobic. "The secrets inside that glimmering white house and in that village had been so tightly hemmed in that sometime soon they'd all be choking," she writes, and the reader may sometimes feel the same way. Worse, it's hard to warm up to Lowe, a man so detached from his emotions and the people around him that for years he has lived as if "through some kind of veil."

But The Pagoda succeeds in another, more difficult task: dramatizing the fundamental ambivalence of human relations corrupted by power. Nothing is black and white in Powell's third novel, least of all the relationship between victim and victimizer, or between savior and torturer. Lowe ends up forgiving even the man who burns down his shop, "for he saw clearly how they were all thrown in and piled up on top of one another and vying for power and trying to carve out niches." For Lowe and for all those whom his secret touches, hatred and love mix in equal measure--a volatile mixture, and one that may leave readers feeling somewhat stunned. The Pagoda is a fine novel, but not easy on anyone involved. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Set in Jamaica in 1893, Powell's anguished if not entirely persuasive third novel (after A Small Gathering of Bones) tells the story of Lowe, an aging Chinese shopkeeper whose 35-year marriage of convenience to a lesbian octoroon named Miss Sylvie becomes a marriage of love as the couple faces the secrets in their pasts. After 12 years of estrangement between Lowe and their daughter, Elizabeth, he decides to write her a letter explaining the hidden origins of their family (which involve his stowaway immigration from China to Jamaica on a slave ship during the 1850s). Before he can finish the letter, however, his shop burns down, killing Cecil, the white man who smuggled him into the country and sexually abused him, but who also set him up in business. Freed of his secret debts to Cecil, Lowe seizes the chance to start his life anew. On the property where his shop once stood, he builds The Pagoda, a school and meeting house for the other Chinese on the island?but not before facing up to the loss of his livelihood, his estrangement from his Chinese heritage and the overriding secret of his family life. Saturated with kaleidoscopic, erotic description and driven by a keen awareness of race and class, this lush historical work, despite distant and uneven characterization and mysteriously disappearing subplots, opens a door on to an exotic, imaginary world where sex roles and racial tensions are tossed aside in the struggle to belong and, at the same time, to cling to ancestral traditions. Agent, Sterling Lord. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 245 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679454896
• ISBN-13: 978-0679454892
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,181,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complicated, but intriguing storytelling., July 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pagoda (Paperback)

This is a serious story of desperate connections, the kind of unconventional connections or couplings that happen between people when a life has been hard or traumatic. The challenge here is for the reader to stretch a little and trust the author to tell a difficult and compelling story, a story definitely beyond our usual mainstream, quick-fix way of thinking. Yes, Lowe has a distant and remote way of loving those around him, but he cares about his world, past and present, and it is the twisted and difficult integrating of those worlds that Patricia Powell attempts here. For this reader, her story is a huge success. This psychologically intense story might not be light enough for the beach, but for a stormy weekend inside, it's perfect.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting and provocative read. Don't miss it!, December 4, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pagoda (Hardcover)

This powerful and evocative novel uses the metaphors of hiding and disguise to explore themes of trauma, uprootedness and loss. Against the riveting backdrop of a turn-of-the-century Jamaica wracked by political and racial upheaval, the main character, Lowe, struggles mightily with the legacy of a cache of secrets that have left him lonely and emotionally straitjacketed. The story, like Lowe, unfolds like a lotus flower, revealing layer upon layer of buried hopes, fears and memories as it tracks Lowe's lurching progress toward his elusive twin goals: to express love and to be seen. Ultimately, Powell captures the unquenchable will of the human spirit to reach toward wholeness and connection. The prose is spectacular - as dense and tactile as the island's tropical heat.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Confusing and Mostly Depressing Read, December 9, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pagoda (Hardcover)

I picked up this book because the author is local (Boston), it is set in an intriguing context (Chinese community in Jamaica), and the main character deals with gender identity issues. I found the gradual revealing of character stories & history unnecessarily and painfully slow. Some of the writing was disjointed and repetitive (both particular words and phrases) and the constant teasing of the unknown parts of the folks in the book became almost grating. Once stories were revealed, I found I liked none of the main characters--including Lowe the "hero". He had huge walls keeping others out and seemed utterly unsatisfied with his life; I was unconvinced by his sudden passion for the pagoda of the title. I felt pulled into the disconnection, lack of relationships between people, and the general hopelessness the author seems to feel about the possibility of building community among people of different backgrounds. There are some glimmers of hope toward the end regarding forgiveness and possibilities of love, but they are indeed only glimmers and remain mostly in this reader's imagination rather than the text. I had not known of the Chinese community in Jamaica and know little more having finished this story. I bought the book as a possible gift for a friend, read it first, and doubt I will actually give it--it is not an uplifting book at all. Hate to give a local woman a bad review, but there it is.