Ah... Ah... Ah... Never Mind.
Written: Jan 14 '06 (Updated Sep 02 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: a glimpse of poor, ravaged Burma, now living in the Witless Protection Program as "Myanmar."
Cons: Cannot connect with characters or story
The Bottom Line: Amy Tan's latest is a departure from her previous fare. She should've danced with the one what brung her.
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| scmrak's Full Review: Amy Tan et al - Un Lugar Llamado Nada/ Saving Fish... |
There's something profoundly dissatisfying about a sneeze that simply will not come. You get that "soon-to-explode" feeling deep in your head, maybe even try a few preparatory ah-ah-ahs, and then it's gone. And the departure leaves you feeling as if somehow a tiny little bit of your essence has been spirited away. That unsatisfied, empty sensation, unfortunately, is pretty much the same feeling I got from reading Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning
On Christmas morning a group of eleven friends disappeared off the face of the earth. Eleven San Franciscans on a tour to the jungles of Myanmar simply vanished without a trace. One might expect a hue and cry to result, with search parties scouring the rainforest and helicopters hovering high above the trees, but one would be wrong: this was Myanmar.
As luck would have it the twelfth member of their traveling party had remained behind at their hotel, so their disappearance was eventually reported and the authorities eventually made a few desultory inquiries. However, it wasn't until the international press got wind of the story (and a high-powered PR firm convinced the military junta that heads the benighted country formerly known as Burma that they had a golden opportunity) that an organized search began. Of course, the junta had its own ideas about where it needed to search...
How the missing Yanks got into their predicament might have been amusing had it not been so sad; how they got out was more of the same. Like Buddhist fishermen who practice the polite fiction that they are Saving Fish from Drowning, the results of the meeting of eleven Americans with the primitive Karen people were predictable from the very start...
Confession time: I've never read The Joy Luck Club. I tried once, but something about the story just didn't grab me, and I laid it aside unfinished. Perhaps I, a white bread Midwestern WASP male, simply couldn't identify with the life of a first-generation Asian immigrant woman in San Francisco. I guess we'll never know. Others who've finished it, however, swear by the considerable skill of author Amy Tan who, clad in knee-high boots and black mini also plays a mean tambourine while singing backup in the Rock Bottom Remainders. But I digress... Tan's forte as a writer has long been a close-up view of the clash of culture between immigrant parents who cling to the old ways and their children who want to assimilate the host country's culture. This time she abandoned that well-polished theme, but perhaps she should have not been so hasty.
What we have in Saving Fish from Drowning is a novel that is to travel fiction what "Seinfeld" was to comedy (I should also confess that I never liked "Seinfeld"): it's about nothing. A dozen people trek off to the jungles of Myanmar, neé Burma, acting along the way like stereotypical Ugly Americans. They tromp on holy ground in dirty shoes, insult their hosts with their rude noisiness, and commit all manner of offenses because they are too lazy or too stubborn to learn another culture. In time-honored tradition, they get what they deserve: malaria, dysentery, bug bites, captured and held hostage by indigenes...
Yet for all their many troubles and travails, for their silliness and their inner dreams, we never learn to either like or dislike a single one of Tan's characters. None is particularly heroic, none is loveable, none is detestable. Most are your basic, ordinary humans - annoying and self-centered - the kind of person standing in front of us in the supermarket express checkout line; the ones with ten items in the eight-items-or-less lane. See what I mean about "Seinfeld"? It's about nothing.
Perhaps the one bright spot is Tan's choice of narrator, Bibi Chen. Or should I say "the spirit of Bibi Chen," for Chen died two weeks before the group's departure. In disembodied form, however, she accompanies her friends on their tour and it is through her all-seeing eyes that the tale is told. There are moments of pure whimsy, moments of hilarity, moments of sadness. Over the entire novel there lies a profound sense of sorrow at the depredations visited upon Myanmar by the junta that now rules that benighted country. That is perhaps the saving grace of Saving Fish from Drowning: it provides a window, however small and grimy, into the ravaged land of Aung San Suu Kyi. For that I thank Ms Tan.
A parting word on the title: practitioners of Buddhism aspire to a life in which they harm no other living being, an aspiration that one would assume precludes the practice of fishing. Yet Buddhist fishermen abound, for they follow the polite fiction that when they pull a fish from the water, they do so to "save the fish from drowning." Alas, the recipients of this grace expire in spite of the fisherman's best efforts. Of course, it would be senseless to allow the dead fish to lie on the banks of the river and rot, so the fishermen gather the bodies and sell them. Practical, yes?
Recommended:
No
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