Griever: An American Monkey King in China (Paperback)

by Gerald Vizenor (Author)
Key Phrases: execution caravan, griever meditation, horsehair duster, Matteo Ricci, Sugar Dee, Hua Lian (more...)

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press (July 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816618496
• ISBN-13: 978-0816618491
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #291,648 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hoot Loudly and Swing a Big Stick, May 14, 1998

By	Jim Dwyer ([e-mail]) (Chico, CA) - See all my reviews

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.)

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not for Monkey King fans, February 6, 2001

By	C. Reyer (St Paul, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Griever, May 28, 2008

By	bookwormMN (Minnesota, USA) - See all my reviews

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!