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Loading... The Harmony Silk Factory (2005)by Tash Aw (Author)
None. ebook  velvetink | Mar 31, 2013 |  Malaysia. Aw's first novel is an extended study of one man, Johnny Lim. Stories about Johnny are told by three narrators in three sections. Each has a complex emotional relationship with Johnny. His disaffected son, eager to expose his father's crimes; his wife Snow, whose diary reveals a more tentative and vulnerable man; and Peter, a British friend who has fled to Malaysia but finds he cannot escape himself. Aw does a good job of differentiating each narrator's voice and preoccupations. There isn't a lot of action here, or even resolution. Rather, the pleasure of the story is in the reader's accretion of knowledge about Johnny, and the somewhat voyeuristic satisfaction of seeing more perspectives than each narrator. (  ) OshoOsho | Mar 30, 2013 | 6  WelcomeBlueValkyrie | Aug 7, 2011 | A well constructed novel with unexpected twists when the story moves from one character's viewpoint to another - Johnny doesn't have his own voice at all. Hated the cover! (  ) siri51 | Feb 20, 2011 | The Harmony Silk Factory starts out very well, and Aw's crisp prose made the first of the book's three sections hum along. I was really intrigued by its setting, about which I know little—Malaysia during and after the Second World War. I was alternately engrossed and enraged by it—the book is a page turner, but I had predicted the denouement before I'd met half of the characters and there are some very clichéd elements here. I found the second section melodramatic, and the protagonist of the third section I didn't believe in as a real person. As a first novel, this really is very good, but I enjoyed Harmony Silk Factory more for the promise Aw shows as a developing writer than for the book as a self-contained entity. ( )2  siriaeve | May 26, 2010 | no reviews | add a review
 Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0007204515, Paperback)A landmark work of fiction from one of Britain's most exciting new writers: The Harmony Silk Factory is a devastating love story set against the turmoil of mid-twentieth century Malaysia. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman -- a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer -- whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley's most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel's narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era. Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page.(retrieved from Amazon Sat, 23 Oct 2010 03:55:43 -0400) The story of Johnny Lim and his marriage to the beautiful Snow Soong. |
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