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SHANGHAI BABY
by Wei Hui (Pocket Books, $24)
YOU CAN'T BEAT this publicity with a stick: A beautiful, young author catalogs her lusty material and sexual pursuits in explicit detail, and the resulting novel becomes a cult hit and is promptly banned and gathered in large quantities to be burned. Such is the story of Chinese writer Wei Hui, whose racy debut, Shanghai Baby, set her homeland in an uproar when it was first released there in 1999. An idolizer of the Beats (and nearly all things American for that matter), Hui's narrator, Nikki,—or Coco (after Chanel) to her friends—is a former-journalist-turned-aspiring- novelist currently shacked up with her gorgeous, impotent boyfriend, Tian Tian, whose softness, so to speak, seems to stem from a deep melancholy she cannot touch. Driven almost equally by ambition and desire, Coco soon finds herself entangled in a heated affair with an affluent German businessman named Mark, who offers her the pleasures of the flesh Tian Tian is unable to provide. From its first pages, the book revels not only in its narrator's own personal decadence and dissolution but in the fast-lane lifestyle of her circle of friends and acquaintances. A motley collection of artists, high-end prostitutes, and entrepreneurs, they relentlessly pursue the golden temptations of the West alongside the more traditional, but equally dangerous, debaucheries of the East.
Baby's Chinese-to-English translation betrays many awkward juxtapositions—the writing tends to veer between Eastern philosophy and clichéd Oprah-isms, and has a disturbing habit of cataloging name brands, both cultural and commercial, in a manner that seems almost compulsive. Wei's constant recitations of designer labels, film stars, and Western song lyrics recalls nothing so much as the utterly empty and corrupt protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Indeed, some readers may be wondering if they've wandered into a time warp, as Wei seems to belong more with Ellis and his '80s contemporaries than in the present Western climate. Throughout, there's a constant lurch between thoughtful, lucid moments and embarrassingly empty purple prose—leading one to question whether it's the cultural divide or the author herself who's to blame. If nothing else, Shanghai Baby offers an intriguing glimpse behind the curtain that has so far concealed the personal dreams and desires of the Far East's hungry new generation and recognizes the universalities within them.
Leah Greenblatt
lgreenblatt@seattleweekly.com
HALF A LIFE
by V.S. Naipaul (Knopf, $24)
V.S. NAIPAUL'S latest novel, Half a Life, follows Willie Chandrahan from India to England to Africa and dissects with precision—and occasionally empathy—the protagonist's "half-lived" life. Split into three sections, each set on a different continent and narrated from a different point of view, the book is as structurally intriguing as it is shrewdly revealing about the nature of identity and the legacy of colonialism. Born in Trinidad, Naipaul has produced over 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, many of which favor these themes, and he won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." Few writers could deliver on the ambitious plot of Half a Life with Naipaul's cool assurance.
The novel begins with the tale of Willie's father, whose uncomfortable relationship to the past leads him to take a vow of silence that, ironically, gives him an international reputation as a wise and spiritual man. After leaving his family behind to move to London, Willie flounders in sexual, political, and personal confusions that echo the ones that encouraged his father to beat a hasty retreat from the world. Unlike his father, however, Willie has a chameleonlike ability to change with his circumstances, although this trait doesn't seem to help him belong. When Willie falls in love with a Portuguese-African woman and follows her to her family plantation in Mozambique, he continues this legacy of "half life" as an Indian outsider among the white plantation owners in Portugal's dying colonial empire. The story of Willie's time in Africa, which makes up the latter third of the novel, is the richest and most compelling part of the narrative and skillfully delves into the ways that Willie's cultural and familial legacy keeps him at arm's length from his life.
Half a Life is a remarkable book from one of the world's most intelligent and sophisticated writers, and it manages an impressive feat—for it's in the very straightforwardness of the telling that Naipaul reveals the most mystical parts of Willie's, and our own, existence.
Kate Chynoweth
info@seattleweekly.com
TAKE IT PERSONALLY: HOW TO MAKE CONSCIOUS CHOICES TO CHANGE THE WORLD
by Anita Roddick (Publishers Group West, $24.95)
ANITA RODDICK is the founder, CEO, and global evangelist of the Body Shop, a British chain of socially conscious beauty-product stores; she's used her business success to advance a wide array of noble causes. Roddick writes that she was transformed by her experience in Seattle's WTO protests—Take It Personally is the radicalized result. It is not, as the subtitle suggests, a consumers' guide for socially aware shoppers; rather, it's a sales catalog of globalization issues. We learn in the fine print that Gavin Lewis is actually the "editor" and that "Anita Roddick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work."
