Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China

Other than having read and loved The Good Earth, I didn't know much about Pearl Buck before picking this up. She's intriguing enough that I'd like to read more of her work, although this book is fairly critical of much of that. The most exciting bits of this book by FAR are the descriptions of her childhood and the dysfunction of her family of origin. Sort of a real-life Poisonwood Bible situation. I'd really like to read her translation of Shui Hu Chuan.

Relentlessly positive portrayal. While Spurling is good for info on Buck's first marriage, don't rely on this biography alone if you want an idea of the actual, rounded person -- indeed, for the actual, rounded anything. Spurling needs to read up on Orientalism; some of this is just embarrassing (when it's not infuriating). Also, Buck's writing about poverty does not automatically make her work Dickensian. Spurling is a good researcher here (on Buck; clueless about China), provides useful background --with several other texts -- for teaching The Good Earth, but I'd never read this for fun and as a biographer she's kind of a hack.

Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth" is one of those 10 or 12 books that had a really big impact on me in my youth. I read several other books by Buck, and although they were good, they weren't quite as amazing as "The Good Earth". Years ago I read her autobiography (of a sort), "My Several Worlds", and liked it a lot, although it was clearly a selective memoir. When I re-read "The Good Earth" recently as well as the follow-up "Sons", I was reminded of how good those stories were and of Buck's gifts as a writer.

I was rather amazed to see two books on Pearl Buck come out this year, Hilary Spurling's "Pearl Buck in China" and the other being "Pearl of China" by Anchee Min, a fictionalized work that seems to have attracted the greater attention show more in the United States. However, I picked up Hilary Spurling's "Pearl Buck in China" as fast as I could.

"Pearl Buck in China" is a rather whirlwind of a book, and Spurling takes a rather aggressive and at times dense approach to presenting Buck's life. Clearly Spurling has done her research and immersed herself in Buck's life and books. I came out of this book knowing much more about Pearl Buck and her times than I would have expected. It is a testament to her strength as a person that she came through life at all. Most of her siblings died very young in China and yet Pearl survived and in an odd way thrived amongst the turmoil. What she saw and lived in her early days would fuel her writings for her lifetime.

Spurling's biography of Buck is much more of an academic work than a conventional "slick" biography. The style, honestly, put me off a bit at times, but I could not deny the research and intensity behind this book. I think the depth of this book would be lost on someone who isn't already fairly familiar with Buck's work. This is because Spurling has interwoven so much of the history with Buck's books. I learned a tremendous amount from this book - both about Buck and events in China. Recommended, with some reservations concerning the style. I kept thinking this could have been written in a more accessible manner. show less

As the title suggests, this is a biography of Pearl Buck, author of The Good Earth. I found it very enjoyable.

Pearl Buck was an American born and raised in China by missionaries. She grew up interacting with Chinese children - speaking the language and learning the stories. She was so comfortable in China that she never really identified with America when she visited there or when she ended up living there in the second half of her life. The book does an interesting job of weaving Chinese history into Buck's life and showing how it influenced and formed her. Also discussed at length is her relationships with her mother, father, and husbands and her complete rejection of the missionary philosophy as practiced in China by her father and show more others.

Her writing is discussed quite a bit as well, particularly because so many of the dozens of books and stories she wrote had considerable portions of autobiographical content or obvious ties to her friends, family, and experiences. I had no idea Pearl Buck had written so prodigiously, but I also have to say I'm not interested in reading much further than a reread of The Good Earth and possibly continuing on with the 2 books that complete the series. Buck's writing was written for the masses and it doesn't seem from this biography's description that most of them were the quality that you'd expect from the author of [The Good Earth]. I did find it interesting that she wrote by crafting the words in Chinese in her mind and translating to English as she typed the manuscript, at least for The Good Earth.

I thought this was a very readable and interesting biography of a fascinating woman. show less

This is an extremely well written and researched book about Pearl Buck, a woman who blazed trails, was a many-layered individual and, I think, born before her time. Her writing did a great deal to raise consciousness about the plight of the millions of Chinese peasants both before and after WWII, among many other causes that she focused on. Hilary Spurling takes advantage of the mounds of letters written by and to Pearl Buck and the host of other materials which encompassed her life and weaves it into a rich, very readable book.

Another audiobook serendipity, riveting and eye-opening. Loses some of its vivid intensity after Buck gets married and the author no longer has the source material of Buck's biographies of her parents, with the emotional truth of Buck's marriage somewhat unclear (perhaps obscured by lack of reliable source material) and her later life just sad and vague. But this book is subtitled "Journey to the Good Earth" not "A Life" and it fully tells the story of that journey. Now that I understand how thoroughly Buck knew the peasant life of which she wrote, I am looking forward to reading The Good Earth, knowing that it will be as authentic as possible, considering the challenges of a literate outsider writing from the point of view of show more illiterate peasants. Hilary Spurling establishes how Pearl's life experiences gave her both the empathy and the knowledge to write authentically about a culture not her own. I was also very touched by the story of Pearl's devotion to her disabled daughter Carol, but a little disturbed by her need to keep adopting new babies later in life, since it seems she did it just to be surrounded by children, not to actually parent them.
(The author reads the audiobook and does a great job.) show less

Peal Buck, the 5th of 7 children, was born in 1892 to American missionary parents working in China, where she was then brought up. She learned Chinese before she learned English, and only realised that she was considered a foreigner when anti-foreigner riots known to as the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 forced the family out of her childhood home. Later she became famous for her novels and short stories set in China, especially The Good Earth. She won America's most famous literary prize, the Pulitzer, in 1932, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Yet her work is mostly forgotten in the US and Europe, and in the country she loved, her books were banned by Mao's regime after they came to power in 1949.

In Burying the Bones, Hilary show more Spurling presents a fascinating and accessible account of the life of this writer, with all its troubles and contradictions. She has drawn on Buck's own writings and those of some of her friends and family. Spurling is the author of many biographies, but is not an expert on China and found that her research was much more restricted for this book than for others, with just six weeks in China and very limited access to research materials not available outside that country. She acknowledges clearly these limitations, which were clearly very frustrating for this professional biographer, but has skilfully read between the lines of Buck's own writings and those of people close to her. She has also had the support of two of her subject's surviving children.

More than a third of the book is about Pearl Buck's parents and her childhood, up to her first return to the US to go to college. Spurling is clearly interested in women's history and writes from a feminist perspective, and she has plenty of material to draw on including Buck's own writings. Buck's mother Carie tragically lost her first 4 children to illness and malnutrition, and then stood up to her husband, insisting that she and the remaining offspring needed a proper home, not to travel around after him. Later, her determination that her daughter should have a university education must have been a rarity in 1910, although from Spurling's account of her years at Randolph-Macon in Virginia, and from other books I've read, American women's educational opportunities were far ahead of those offered in Britain at the time. Buck often wrote about young people struggling to adapt to a move between cultures, between Asia and America.

Buck initially returned to China to see and look after her sick mother in 1914, but stayed for another 20 years, in which she married, wrote her most famous book and several others, had a child who had various learning and physical disabilities, divorced and remarried. She left China with her new husband for various reasons including arrangements for Carol's education and care, and her pariah status among China's ex-pat community (mostly missionaries) as a divorcee. Although the first half of her life, that spent in China, inspired most of her work, and she left the country she loved so much very reluctantly, there is plenty more about her later life back in the US – though this must have been very difficult and sad at times, it was clearly never boring. With Richard, she adopted 7 babies within just a few years, intending that they would look after their brood on their own, and she continued her own writing career, bits of this made me feel tired just reading them.

Although the subtitle of the book is Pearl Buck in China, Spurling actually covers the whole of her subject's life, up until her death aged 80 in 1973, quite comprehensively. There are detailed endnotes in the book though many of them just clarify which book a quotation comes from and I think it's not really necessary to look at all the references in the way I did. There is a very comprehensive index. More interestingly for the general reader, there are 16 pages of black and white photographs of Pearl Buck and most of the significant people in her life in the middle of the book. There is a map of 'Pearl Buck's China' showing the significant places in her and her family's life at the start of the book. I do think that one extra addition to this book would have been useful – a bibliography of Pearl Buck's many novels, short stories and non-fiction writings.

Burying the Bones is a very readable account of an interesting life, which has made me want to sample some of Pearl Buck's own work.

This review was originally written for http://www.thebookbag.co.uk https://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/Burying_the_Bones:_Pearl_Buck_in_China_by_H... show less