17
Apr
2009
Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan
In Saving Fish From Drowning, Amy Tan veers from her normal litany of mother-daughter relationships, to explore the adventure of an American tourist group kidnapped in Burma (and yes, she insists on calling it Burma, not Myanmar, so I shall be following suite in this review). Told through the eyes of a ghost, and the group’s organizer, Tan takes on several other themes and plot devices foreign to her usual milieu.
It’s part ghost story. Part religious exploration. Part political exercise. An other, less experienced writer than Tan probably couldn’t pull it off.
She takes a good hard look on global economics, tourism, Burmese politics, and Western influence on other cultures. But she is able to do so in a way that these themes are woven into the fabric of the story and characters, not laid on top of them.
The group of tourists are not captured by the government or anything like that, but by a village that is struggling to better itself. Even the reader gets a little Stockholm Syndrome.
Obviously this book accepts that ghosts are real. It’s told by one. But it also steeps itself in the animism of Southeast Asia. Nats are spirits believed to inhabit places like trees, and must be appeased with things like money and cigarettes, so that they won’t fuck with you. So persuasive is this belief that a few weeks after finished this book, I was in this little Wiccan bookshop in Seattle that has a little altar devoted to some goddess or other (I don’t really recall who it was), and I said to myself, “Ack! Nats!” and so I left a little piece of Dove dark chocolate I had in my purse.
Seriously, I’m not gonna fuck with that.
Tan gives herself the pseudonym at the beginning of this book, of May Brown. May is an anagram for Amy, and brown is a synonym for tan. In this “author’s note” she explains that this whole story about to unfold was based on a paper clipping she had on the death of her narrator. This is all part of the story. There was no paper clipping or anything else like that. I know this because I saw Tan read from this book when it first came out and she said so, but a lot of people seem to not get that.
Overall, Tan’s voice is strong as ever, and her characters are sharper, more dynamic than those sometimes criticized in her other novels.
Just beware of the Nats.
Buy Saving Fish from Drowning on Amazon
If you like this book/author, you might like:
(my reviews in blue)
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Deep River by Shusaku Endo
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma by Thyat Myint-U
Letters from Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi
The Voice of Hope by Aung San Suu Kyi
Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle
Burmese Days by George Orwell
Flame Tree: A Novel of Modern Burma by Keith Dahlberg
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe
JPod by Douglas Coupland
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Other Works by Amy Tan:
The Joy Luck Club
The Kitchen God’s Wife
The Bonesetter’s Daughter
The Moon Lady
Opposite of Fate a Book of Musing
Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat
The Hundred Secret Senses
With Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Dave Barry, and Tabitha King:
With Maya Angelou and Mary Higgins-Clark:
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