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Loading... Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novelby Arthur Golden
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A beautifully written book, and very descriptive. All of the characters feel important to the story. I typically like to give my books away after I've read them, but this one is hard to give up. (  ) KDavidson828 | Dec 6, 2009 |  I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is so beautifully written, almost lyrical. Sometimes I forgot the author is a man and it really wasn't a woman writing this. The story is so believable that it wasn't until reading acknowledgments at the end that I was reminded it is a work of fiction. (  ) Narilka | Nov 20, 2009 | Memoirs of A Geisha is an extremely detailed book involving the life of Sayuri from the time she is a little girl until she becomes an elderly adult. Sayuri is sold to a family in the purpose of becoming a geisha. She loses all contact with her father, mother, and eventually her older sister. The emotional and physical obstacles Sayuri is forced to overcome are extremely realistic. The novel was very well written and after finishing it, I could not believe that this story wasn't non fiction. (  )1  df5b_jenniferw | Nov 10, 2009 | Memoirs of a Geisha takes you through the life of a young woman from childhood until she became one of the most popular Geishas. In this page-turner, you learn about a young womans struggle but also you have an opportunity to get an understanding of the original meaning of Geisha compared to what many people think it means today. The movie did this book very little justice except to give you a picture of the places where the story took place. However, the author described them in such detail that your imagination would have these places almost perfect anyway. dst2diva | Nov 2, 2009 | This is the sort of book that draws you in from the very first page. As the title suggests, it is the story of Sayuri, sold by her parents at a young age to an okiya, a geisha house. Not only is it an engrossing story of suffering, longing, and triumph, it's also a fascinating look at the life of a geisha during the 1930s and 40s. The description of the places and characters was so vivid I could see it all. The whole concept behind a geisha - that having a mistress was not only acceptable but even expected of wealthy men - was somewhat jarring to my Western sensibilities, but the tale was told with such compassion and earnestness that it was easy to get drawn in to the different culture, and almost forget that it was written by a middle-aged American man and not an aged Japanese woman. There were things here and there that struck me as unrealistic - Nobu's interest in geisha despite finding them irritating, the pure malice of several characters - but by and large it was a great read. ( ) melydia | Oct 28, 2009 | 
 Mr. Golden gives us not only a richly sympathetic portrait of a woman, but also a finely observed picture of an anomalous and largely vanished world. He has made an impressive and unusual debut.  Haarhuis's foreword and Golden's epilogue, the one appropriating the guise of a novel and the other taking it off, suggest an author who is of two minds when it comes to his work. It is not surprising, then, if his readers share this uncertainty. The decision to write an autobiographically styled novel rather than a nonfiction portrait is most obviously justified in terms of empathy, of allowing greater freedom to explore the geisha's inner life. Unfortunately, Sayuri's personality seems so familiar it is almost generic; she is not so much an individual as a faultless arrangement of feminine virtues.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0679781587, Paperback)According to Arthur Golden's absorbing first novel, the word "geisha" does not mean "prostitute," as Westerners ignorantly assume--it means "artisan" or "artist." To capture the geisha experience in the art of fiction, Golden trained as long and hard as any geisha who must master the arts of music, dance, clever conversation, crafty battle with rival beauties, and cunning seduction of wealthy patrons. After earning degrees in Japanese art and history from Harvard and Columbia--and an M.A. in English--he met a man in Tokyo who was the illegitimate offspring of a renowned businessman and a geisha. This meeting inspired Golden to spend 10 years researching every detail of geisha culture, chiefly relying on the geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who spent years charming the very rich and famous.The result is a novel with the broad social canvas (and love of coincidence) of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen's intense attention to the nuances of erotic maneuvering. Readers experience the entire life of a geisha, from her origins as an orphaned fishing-village girl in 1929 to her triumphant auction of her mizuage (virginity) for a record price as a teenager to her reminiscent old age as the distinguished mistress of the powerful patron of her dreams. We discover that a geisha is more analogous to a Western "trophy wife" than to a prostitute--and, as in Austen, flat-out prostitution and early death is a woman's alternative to the repressive, arcane system of courtship. In simple, elegant prose, Golden puts us right in the tearoom with the geisha; we are there as she gracefully fights for her life in a social situation where careers are made or destroyed by a witticism, a too-revealing (or not revealing enough) glimpse of flesh under the kimono, or a vicious rumor spread by a rival "as cruel as a spider." Golden's web is finely woven, but his book has a serious flaw: the geisha's true romance rings hollow--the love of her life is a symbol, not a character. Her villainous geisha nemesis is sharply drawn, but she would be more so if we got a deeper peek into the cause of her motiveless malignity--the plight all geisha share. Still, Golden has won the triple crown of fiction: he has created a plausible female protagonist in a vivid, now-vanished world, and he gloriously captures Japanese culture by expressing his thoughts in authentic Eastern metaphors. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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