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Loading... Interior Chinatownby Charles Yu
  
No current Talk conversations about this book. Una riflessione sull'integrazione e sulla banalizzazione di una cultura, vissuta come viaggio nelle radici familiari. L'autore è sceneggiatore e usa appieno i suoi mezzi "cinematografici" per lavorare in modo originale sui piani del discorsi sugli stili e sul linguaggio. Bella scoperta. (  ) d.v. | May 16, 2023 |  i ordered this book without seeing the cover, which was a huge mistake. It has a National book award winner sticker on it. If I had seen this I would have avoided it. National book award winning books are awarded because either the reader is supposed t be educated by what the author has to say, the book is a critics darling, or it is told in some ridiculous quirky inventive way. Interior Chinatown checks all 3 boxes. So Uhm. Ok. This book could have been good. I get I am supposed to feel bad about the stereotyping of Asians in America, what I don’t get is why the book is done the way it is. Why not tell it in true non fiction? Is it supposed to be satire? Is it supposed to be funny? Funny it really isn’t. Boring comes to mind. Told as a vast number of stereotypical Asian actors are cast in an idiotic TV show by Hollywood- as if that is a representation of reality, the book is sort of in script form- which I found extremely annoying. The problem is once we know all of the stereotyped Asian characters the book stops being educational or entertaining, it becomes repetitive. I guess it is just too highbrow for me. (  ) zmagic69 | Mar 31, 2023 | Unique due to the screenplay format, I found the plot lacking as much as the characters. There's really not much to say about it other than it wasn't what I hoped for. Different strokes for different folks! ( ) Jonathan5 | Feb 20, 2023 | Winner of the National Book Award, Interior Chinatown portrays the Asian immigrant experience through the metaphor of a Hollywood screenplay, skillfully drawing on all the stereotypes loaded onto Asian Americans. This book is just brilliant. (  ) etxgardener | Feb 3, 2023 | NA ( ) eshaundo | Jan 7, 2023 |
Charles Yu’s funny and surreal new novel, Interior Chinatown, hijacks the leaden tropes of Hollywood and the bare form of screenwriting to excavate the inner life of an Asian American man struggling to repudiate the hard-baked boundaries of marginalization.... Willis embodies the ambient anxiety of lacking an explicit identity—Asian Americans take up what Cathy Park Hong calls “apologetic space”—which Yu gestures toward humorously in these ironic naming choices. Willis’s mother once was a Pretty Oriental Flower and a Restaurant Hostess, his father a Kung Fu Master and an Egg Roll Cook....Getting cast as Kung Fu Guy was never the challenge Willis made it out to be. What actually eludes him—and his family, friends, and neighbors who populate Interior Chinatown—is real, emotional freedom.... there are a few places where we catch its glimmers: a karaoke song performed while intoxicated, a love that has forgiving margins, an identity that asserts itself without performance. On the surface, Yu’s title refers to a location setting, in this case a generic Chinese restaurant in a generic Chinatown in a fictional police series entitled White and Black. The protagonist Willis Wu, a veteran of bit parts ranging from Disgraced Son to Striving Immigrant, finds himself at a murder scene in a family restaurant playing yet another variation of Generic Asian Man.... Yu freely weaves satire with social commentary, speculative fiction with identity politics. Without leaving its fantasy world, the story often turns bracingly real. Though much of his protagonist’s insecurities are narrowly focused—not just Asian, but specifically Asian American—his accumulation of concerns becomes surprisingly and relatably inclusive. CHARLES YU SPECIALIZES in ferreting out that peculiar angle, that spark of the unexpected, that re-illumination of an otherwise age-old narrative, and then taking that fantastical story element and spreading it horizontally until it coats the entirety of his writing’s universe. In other words, he writes in conceit.... It’s speculative in its surreal setting. It’s family drama in the centrality of family relationships. It’s satire in its political and social commentary. It’s comedic. It’s literary. It’s weird and experimental. It’s an identity story couched in a kind of a fantasy setting, a kind of a George Saundersesque alternate reality. It’s all of those things, but maybe mostly, it’s allegory. And Yu does allegory as well as anybody, taking an outrageous concept and using it to communicate the dire mundanity and the resonant emotional struggles of the human experience. An acid indictment of Asian stereotypes and a parable for outcasts feeling invisible in this fast-moving world.
Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy--the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.89)
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