Tripmaster Monkey

Fülszöveg

THIS is Maxine Hong Kingston's first work of fiction. It is the third book in the remarkable career that began when The Woman Warrior was everywhere acclaimed ("The debased word 'thrilling' here applies," Walter demons wrote in Newsweek; in The New York Times John Leonard called it "dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword") and went on to win the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfic-tion. Four years later her China Men was equally applauded. "A triumph of the highest order—of imagination, of language, of moral perception," Mary Gordon wrote in The New York Times Book Review, and critics across the country agreed.
Now, making her debut as a novelist, Maxine Hong Kingston brings her richly astonishing perception to the San Francisco of the sixties and its life of youth and art. Her hero is Wittman Ah Sing, a young Chinese American one year out of Berkeley, six feet tall, skinny, hip, an unstoppable, word-drunk playwright, poet, and talker. Wittman is... Tovább

Fülszöveg

THIS is Maxine Hong Kingston's first work of fiction. It is the third book in the remarkable career that began when The Woman Warrior was everywhere acclaimed ("The debased word 'thrilling' here applies," Walter demons wrote in Newsweek; in The New York Times John Leonard called it "dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword") and went on to win the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfic-tion. Four years later her China Men was equally applauded. "A triumph of the highest order—of imagination, of language, of moral perception," Mary Gordon wrote in The New York Times Book Review, and critics across the country agreed.
Now, making her debut as a novelist, Maxine Hong Kingston brings her richly astonishing perception to the San Francisco of the sixties and its life of youth and art. Her hero is Wittman Ah Sing, a young Chinese American one year out of Berkeley, six feet tall, skinny, hip, an unstoppable, word-drunk playwright, poet, and talker. Wittman is (naturally, given the time and place) a rebel. But, like Monkey—the blessed saint-troublemaker of Chinese legend who helped bring the Buddhist scriptures from India, and to whom our hero bears more than a passing resemblance—Wittman is a rebel with a cause. His dream is to write and stage a huge and impossible version of several interwoven Chinese novels and folktales involving everything from besieged cities to flying horses to pitched thousand-man battles, "an enormous loud play that will awake an audience for us." And he does it. He also, in the extraordinary course of things, takes a wife, falls in love (with somebody else), hunts for his grandmother in Reno, goes to parties, gets fired, declaims Rilke to fellow bus passengers, and never stops wishing he'd been around a few years earlier when the Beats were in town. His journey through an American time as fantastic as his Vissza