Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000010278413 | PR9530.9.E54 G37 2012 | Open Access Book | Creative Book | Searching... |
Searching... | 33000000015277 | PR9530.9.E54 G37 2012 | Open Access Book | 1:CREATIVE_G | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
It's Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambrige and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo.
Reviews 3
Publisher's Weekly Review
After having endured the miseries of a Japanese internment camp during WWII, 28-year-old Yun Ling Teoh makes her way in 1951 to the only Japanese garden in her native Malaya in a bid to convince its caretaker, Nakamura Aritomo, the former gardener for the Emperor of Japan, to establish a commemorative plot for her sister who died in the camp. Though he initially refuses, Aritomo agrees to mentor Yun Ling so that she might design the garden herself. While toiling away in Yugiri, the titular "garden of evening mists," Yun Ling grows fond of Aritomo, meanwhile recalling the horrors of the camp and the difficulties of the post-WWII "Emergency" in Malaya, a prolonged period of guerrilla war whose reach creeps closer by the day. Alternating between her time with Aritomo and a future wherein the now-aged Yun Ling, fighting a degenerative brain disease, desperately seeks to preserve her memories of the garden, Eng's newest (after The Gift of Rain) has the makings of a moving and unique historical, but the novel falls flat. There is a puzzling lack of pathos, and Eng's similar treatment of the tragic and the mundane serves to downplay rather than highlight the differences between the two. As a result, there is very little-other than Eng's moving atmospherics and attention to detail-to draw readers along. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
As intricately designed as a Japanese garden, this deceptively quiet novel resonates with the power to inspire a variety of passionate emotions. Reflecting back on her life as a neurological disease threatens to erase her memories, retired Chinese-Malaysian judge Teoh Yun Ling reveals, layer by layer, the horrors she and her sister experienced during the war when they were interred in a Japanese slave-labor camp. As the sisters attempt to mentally escape by immersing themselves in intricate recollections of the Japanese gardens they once visited, the brutality of their reality increases daily. After the war, Yun Ling appeals to Nakamura Aritomo, the exiled former gardener to the emperor of Japan to design a garden in her sister's memory. Instead, she becomes Aritomo's apprentice and eventually his lover. It is many years before all of her own secrets and those of Aritomo are revealed, for nothing is as simple as it initially appears in the Garden of Evening Mists. A haunting novel certain to stay with the reader long after the book is closed.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Like his debut, The Gift of Rain (2007), Malaysian author Tan's second novel is exquisite and, like Gift, arrives stateside with Booker Prize long-list approval. Recently retired judge Teoh Yun Ling has at most a year before she will lose all language and memory to aphasia. She leaves Kuala Lumpur for the highlands of central Malaysia and finds Yugiri-the book's eponymous Garden of Evening Mists-where she's agreed to meet a Japanese scholar writing a book about Yugiri's creator, Aritomo, the self-exiled former gardener to the emperor of Japan. Four decades earlier, in spite of being the single survivor of a horrific World War II Japanese prison, Yun Ling apprenticed herself to Aritomo, hoping to someday create the perfect garden to honor her murdered sister. Almost 38 years have passed since Aritomo disappeared, and now, threatened with erasure, Yun Ling begins to record his story as well as her own. VERDICT Tan triumphs again, entwining the redemptive power of storytelling with the search for elusive truth, all the while juxtaposing Japan's ignominious war history with glorious moments of Japanese art and philosophy. Readers in search of spectacular writing will not be disappointed.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
