"...No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind...Thinking? At last I have discovered it - thought; this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist - that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist...I am a thinking thing."
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy -
Second Meditation
The NYLS Book Review - Fiction
Title: Brothers
Author: Da Chen
ISBN: 1-4000-9728-2
Format: Hardcover, 432pp
Pub. Date: September 2006
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Review:
I remember, at the age of six, telling my play partner that I would hate him for the rest of my life. Though I can’t recall what his infraction was to have been, I do remember his response – that he would hate me even after death. We then proceeded to destroy one another’s toys until we found ourselves sitting amid tangled piles of rubble lamenting the fact that scarcely any decent toys remained to play with. Such are the ways of boys. Such is the nature of hate.
Chen’s, Brothers, opens with the calamitous birth of a child who only moments after his emergence is forced, by the life sustaining umbilical cord to which he is still attached, to mimic his mother’s suicidal leap from a cliff in the Balan village that was to be his home. Snagged in the branches of a protruding tree and saved from certain death, he is rescued by a local medicine man and begins a miserable life as Shento – “the summit of the mountain”. In a Beijing hospital another child is born. His life begins the sixth generation of the Long clan: one of China’s elite ruling families whose members control both the Central Bank of China and command the country’s armed forces. Under the watchful eye of this distinguished pedigree and behind the fortress-like walls in which they reside, this child begins a life of privilege and breeding as Tan. The two children by an inauspicious hand of fate are half-brothers; half-brothers who will grow to harbor a visceral hatred for each other; a hatred so profound it will lift one to the office of China’s presidency.
To complicate matters further there is the beautiful and articulate Sumi Wo, a tragic character who starts her existence in a cruel Fujian orphanage suffering hardships and indignities Dickens’, David Copperfield had never known. Her ascent to become China’s leading literary voice is fraught with difficulties; the least of which are the antagonisms that exist between pro-democracy stalwarts and the militarized Communist power structure in play towards the end of China’s Cultural Revolution. The more significant of her problems, however, is that the only two men she has ever loved have each become the embodiment of the two dueling political ideologies whose every attempt to undercut the other can only result in rending China to pieces. These two men are the brothers Shento and Tan.
To some, Brothers may initially read as a story of revenge and the self-destruction that inevitably awaits those who choose to travel its stony path. And, though it is that, closer examination forces the reader to add loneliness, isolation, and desolation of spirit to the putrefying emotional stockpot. The insatiable lust for power and the unquenchable thirst for wealth harbored by the male protagonists are to name only a few of the virulent strains of spiritual dysfunction that rot men’s souls. Or, are these merely symptoms? Putting aside, briefly, my love of the metaphoric style, it is worthwhile noting that Chen subtlety embeds the causal agent to the dysfunction the brothers share deep within the subtext of the narrative and then camouflages it – an engaging literary game. Be that as it may, it is the desire to possess that emerges as the true culprit in this manifestation of Chen’s literary thought (the desire to be possessed – as is the case with Shento and what he perceives to be the unjust deprivation of his rightful identity – is the mirrored image of the same malady). This familiar culprit argues in its own defense the same familiar line: is love without the notion of ownership possible? A hackneyed question? Perhaps. But, in the light of Chen’s text even this seemingly outmoded question reveals a nuance: for wealthy, powerful and influential men, is love without ownership desirable? Many will answer no, claiming such are the ways of boys.
The writing style employed in Brothers is unassuming and straightforward and may at times seem pat when juxtaposed with the extraordinary occurrences being described. Also, there are times when magnificent successes in what should be complex business maneuvers are achieved by Tan after what appears to be impulsive, headlong dashes to market with inchoate business ideas. It may be the author’s intention here to show the vast opportunities available during this period of China’s “transition”. If not, it is simply insulting. That said, the characters in Brothers are complex, passionate, and fallible. They are human, have real problems and respond to them as humans often do, many times destroying themselves or the things they hold dear in the process. But, such is the nature of hate. Chen should be lauded for this achievement.
© Joel Glenn, Book Critic –The NYLS Book Review, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Brothers by Da Chen