Book Summary (From Goodreads)
TRUTH IS NOT AN OPTION....
Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official
records. No one has any memory of it, and no one can care less. Except for a
small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the
sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that has possessed the Chinese nation.
When they kidnap a
high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn - not only
about their leaders, but also about their own people - stuns them to the core.
It is a message that will rock the world.... Terrifying methods of cunning,
deception, and terror are unveiled by the truth-seekers in this thriller-expose
of the Communist Party's stranglehold on China today.
My
review
First of all, let me tell
you, this is probably one of the hardest books I've read in a while. Not
because it was in French, but the subject was so dense! A friend of mine recommended
this book and when he described it to me it seemed very interesting, so I
borrowed it. Well, it was interesting, but oh my was it a hard read.
Just as what happened to
me while reading The Colonel there
were a lot of cultural references that I missed, even thought the book has glossary
at the end and a lot of foot notes. I do watch the news, and try to follow
current events as much as I can, but I'm not very strong in foreign politics,
and this books confirmed that to me.
Either way, it was a very
interesting book; while not completely fiction since it takes a lot of events
that actually happened in China's past the future that Koonchung portrays is
not necessarily a premonition of the path that the world economy will take.
The main characters were very complex, not only
with their past but the way they see the world, and I liked the way in which
their paths end up being intertwined.
A word of advice, be very
patient with the book; although there are things happening, the biggest
questions I had all during the book are not answered until the VERY end, the
thir part of the book, and even then I had the feeling that the questions where
not completely answered which disappointed me a little. I have the feeling that
the story was left unfinished and I don't like this feeling.
There is a lot of
political criticism in the books as you
can imagine, but there is also a nice humanity in the way the characters
confront what happens to them. Something
that I liked a lot was that this criticism was not only applicable to one
country:
If the officers of the
government have the will to work hard for the things they are doing, then
ordinary people are capable of pushing the rural economy.
Is a very simple sentence
when you read it, but I feel is something that applies to any economy,
specially now a days.
There was also some critic
to reading...well, to reading in a bubble I guess, and this par hit me
particularly, because it is true that I tend to rest amongst genres that make
me feel comfortable and by staying within them, and mostly by remaining so
attached to fiction I might be missing a lot of changes happening around me in
"the real world". Is not that the author discourages reading fiction
by no means, I think his intention is not to discourage fiction at all, but
maybe to not forget what happens beyond fiction in all of its forms, before
turning into a society that no longer sees its reality.
My favorite sentence of
the book was this:
We are a society that
has in it the perfume of books.
This perfume is a great one..as
long as it doesn't cause an obtund view of our reality.
