Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain's Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories is, as one might extrapolate, a bit of a puzzle. She offers readers richly detailed, specific moments in the lives of her characters—not necessarily in chronological order—and the reader has to construct these pieces to build for herself the underlying narrative. The stories are set in China, France, and the US and span a period from the mid-20th Century to the present.

I want to say both that
1. reading this book requires a willingness to be a bit frustrated
and
2. the pay-off in the end makes those frustrations worthwhile.

Sze-Lorrain trusts readers to come to this book with an internal sense of the timeline of recent Chinese history beginning just before the communist revolution, moving through the cultural revolution, the student uprisings in Tiananmen square, to today's more pragmatic and economically based relations between China and the rest of the world. The reader doesn't need to be an excerpt in any of this, but consulting Wikipedia before beginning reading and as needed during the book's progression certainly wouldn't hurt.

Dear Chrysanthemums is one of those books that offer a significant payoff in the end. The final story clarifies the relationships among the disparate characters so that an overview of the China's recent history as experienced by its citizens suddenly becomes clear, as if one has reached the apex of a string of hills and is looking out over a new landscape. And after that reading, comes all the interesting chewing on what Sze-Lorraine has given us, finding our own understandings of the book's characters and lessons. This is the phase I'm in now, and I'm quite enjoying it.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Net Galley; the opinions are my own.… (meer)