The Harmony Silk Factory
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.47 (662 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1594481741 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 416 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-07-23 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"impressive writing for a newcomer,but a banal plot" according to Hortensia. It's impressive any time a new author writes a book and gets it published. Writing isn't easy, and re-writing is even harder. So, this is a good effort by a new author, but it suffers from having a lot of style but a banal plot. As the voice of three different people, the author is pretty convincing. It's just that the story itself isn't very interesting. I think it might have been a better book if it was longer, with more background about Johnny Lim's history and the background of events before, during, and after WWII. It should have been a blockbuster, in other words. . keetmom said An awkward read where narrative falls victim to structure. "The Harmony Silk Factory" seems to have meant different things to different readers. I fall very squarely into the disappointed camp. Spurred on by some of the praise from highbrow book reviews, I thought I would be in for a reading treat, but found the book implausible from the get go. The two main characters, Johnny and Snow, came across as very mechanical, woodenly playing out their roles as cast by Tash Aw. It all seemed so very unlikely as, from Johnny's self made fortune against the odds to their marriage and the doomed sailing trip, nothing rang true. I found it . "Plodding through the Malaysian jungle" according to E. Smiley. The Harmony Silk Factory is a narrative dealing primarily with Malaysia prior to the Second World War (also briefly discussing the situation during and after the war), as narrated by three distinct characters. The first section, narrated by Jasper, the son of the infamous Johnny Lim (possibly the protagonist, although we never hear from him directly), is interesting but not riveting. Jasper is the classic unreliable narrator, hating his father so much that we know he can't be objective. Second comes Snow, Jasper's mother and Johnny's wife, and here the narrative is bogge
But to his son, Jasper, Johnny is a crook and a collaborator who betrayed the very people he pretended to serve, and the Harmony Silk Factory is merely a front for his father's illegal businesses. Joseph Conrad, W. This debut novel from Tash Aw gives us an exquisitely written look into another culture at a moment of crisis.The Harmony Silk Factory won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award and also made it to the 2005 Man Booker longlist. . In Tash Aw, we now have an authentic Malaysian voice that remaps this literary landscape.The Harmony Silk Factory traces the story of textile merchant Johnny Lim, a Chinese peasant living in British Malaya in the first half
The most boisterous and enjoyable thread of this story belongs to Peter, with whose chipper English patter Aw, oddly enough, seems most at home. All rights reserved. Jasper is the typical alienated son who burns to discover all the crimes his father committed; this also makes him the typical unreliable narrator (when his father kills a mosquito that had bitten him, Jasper cites this as proof of an innate "streak of malice"). The chief benefit of this structural trick is to make palpable the limitations of each character's perspective, and that's no mean feat. . Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Long after Johnny's death, we hear these conflicting accounts from his grown son, Jasper; his wife, Snow (through the lens of her 1941 diary); and his English expatriate friend, Pete