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Loading... The Dissident: A Novel (P.S.)by Nell Freudenberger
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. An uneven novel from the female wunderkind of the New York literati. The scenes that take place in China are well imagined and delivered. The West Coast dysfunctional family is trite. (  )cmeatto | Jan 4, 2009 |   An engaging story about a Chinese experimental artist who comes to stay with a dysfunctional upper-middle-class family in LA. The writing style with a little too straight-forward and overly detailed for my taste. And in the end many things were left unresolved. I felt that I had no closure at the end of the book. The book is too long, building up a bunch of story lines then leaving them hanging in the end. I also hold personal resentment against any book that seems book-club-y and this is one of those. ( )chandraceta | Oct 27, 2008 | An excellent story of a young, well raised man, who through his cousin, becomes involved in the illegal performing art world. HIs cousin encourgages and arranges him to stay in America for a year for a fellowship with a university. He teaches at a US high school and is shocked at , firstly, the attitudes of the students and secondly the sloppiness of the "advanced Art" Class. It is through this class that he meets June, a teenaged gifted artist. There are two other story lines, all well written and one is as important as the others. We get a well to do middle aged, housewife whose marriage is disintergrating and the other is our hero's historical background includeing about his cousin. All the stories mesh together nicely and there is no sense of chopping and changing. A smooth execution of all three stories make this book a joy to read (  )woosang | Dec 30, 2007 | I loved Freudenberger's short story collection & eagerly picked up /The Dissident/ when I saw it in the library. The characters are as lively and fully-conceived as those in /Lucky Girls/--lively enough that in the end I felt like only one thread of the story had been tied up, and all the rest left hanging. But a good read, and an enjoyable fictionalization of the eighties art-scene in communist China. ( )nefernika | Jan 18, 2007 | 0.051 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0060758724, Paperback)From the PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of Lucky Girls comes an intricately woven novel about secrets, love, art, identity, and the shining chaos of every day American life. Yuan Zhao, a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident, has accepted a one-year artist's residency in Los Angeles. He is to be a Visiting Scholar at the St. Anselm's School for Girls, teaching advanced art, and hosted by one of the school's most devoted families: the wealthy if dysfunctional Traverses. The Traverses are too preoccupied with their own problems to pay their foreign guest too much attention, and the dissident is delighted to be left alone—his past links with radical movements give him good reason to avoid careful scrutiny. The trouble starts when he and his American hosts begin to view one another with clearer eyes. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:08 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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