Review
Books have this way of binding you down to time and place like the Amitav Ghosh book - Ghost-Eye before this, which was which was about 1960s Calcutta. This book is about three time periods in China - the Japanese invasion of China, the Cultural Revolution, and the present time. I had read about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in Breakneck, but not this viscerally.
There are some magical-realism elements in the book, but not that many.
The story begins in present day when Qianze’s father returns from wherever he had gone to. Qianze has to deal with her father being back and his sickness, where he does not seem to remember where and when he is.
Through interweaving stories, we hear about his childhood and early life and that of his mother (which I thought was his grandmother’s story and not his mother). They have both done things to survive. And I guess that’s the point.
I felt lucky while reading this book, that we were not born in these times (or maybe we were but don’t remember).
Like Ghost-Eye this is another book, where I was deeply engrossed in the plot, the writing, the stories, the lives of the protagonists - no matter how painful. The plot was nothing to write home about. And I guess that’s OK.