boulevard redundancy reduncancy possession

books:

6 reviews
Timothy Mo

Paddleless Press, 2002

One of the best novels of the 20th Century
It is the best I have read. The title is the theme: individual courage in any 20th century national poltical struggle is redundant, irrelevant to the outcome of that struggle. I saw the same thing - on both sides of the conflict- living in Chile during and after the Allende government. Mo's narrator saw it in East Timor after the Indonesian invasion. It is simply brilliant: a War and Peace for ...

An Insular Possession

1 review
Timothy Mo

Paddleless Press, 2002

Leisurely, well-researched novel
Leisurely may be the best word to describe this novel set during the first Opium War and the founding of the British settlement at Hong Kong. Timothy Mo takes his time letting us get to know Gideon Chase and Walter Eastman and a large cast of traders, artists, debutantes and warriors who shared a cocooned existence in the trading enclaves of Canton, Macao and Hong Kong in the late 1830s and early ...

SOUR SWEET

8 reviews
TIMOTHY MO

VINTAGE, 1992

Entertaining first but certainly insightful as well
I recommend this novel without reservation. It is almost a shock to read a novel written in a classically disciplined style. Mo's writing doesn't take short cuts or skip on background. Conventional in the finest sense and bold in terms of story and character rather than style. I was swept up in the story of the Chen family and the London triad. Having lived in Taiwan for over a year, I also ...

The Monkey King

4 reviews
Timothy Mo

Paddleless Press, 2000

I loved this book.
This story of a Cantonese family in Hong Kong is filled with warmth and humor. It tracks the relationship between Wallace, a clever young man of Portuguese-Cantonese descent, and the family's shrewd, miserly, tyrannical patriarch. Perhaps it's a bit of a fairy tale that works out too smoothly in the end. But Mo writes so well about families - and is so good at capturing the magic of people ...

The Reduncancy of Courage

1 review
Timothy Mo

Vintage, 1980

Exhilarating and revealing
I picked this book up off a used book rack in some tiny town while backpacking through India. What a great read, especially since I had previous knowledge of the situation in East Timor (upon which this book is based) from my activist days in college. A revealing book about inner strength and weakness, the will for survival, and one man's struggle between his principles and his comfort all in ...

Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard

1 review
Timothy Mo

Paddleless Press, 1997

enticing but
Enticing but its really hard to read. His characters are interesting. Some of their background comes out of nowhere unlike other writers of philippine fiction. I could tell the author is really intelligent and he switches voices from character to character convincingly. But in perhaps an amateur sort of way, he uses so much side clauses, side info, and sentences on the side that its really hard ...