ElectricMari reviewed Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen
What a weird book.
3 stars
Whenever I go into reading a more contemporary book, I try to go in without expectations. As my bio says, I am a lover of classics (one of the jokes I used to say was that if the author hadn't been dead for at least 100 years, I wan't interested), I am not that well versed in what has been written in the last 10/20 years. Well, this book was not it. It's not good fiction writing. It's painfully obvious that the author is a journalist with maybe some prose ambitions. While it was interesting having a glimpse of Chinese and its everyday life and people (as an American journalist could tell it/see it), the layout of these short stories was awkward to say the least. Plus, it almost felt like the Chen thought that by adding weird, misplaced metaphores, her short stories would give a more "fictional" impression. Nope. …
Whenever I go into reading a more contemporary book, I try to go in without expectations. As my bio says, I am a lover of classics (one of the jokes I used to say was that if the author hadn't been dead for at least 100 years, I wan't interested), I am not that well versed in what has been written in the last 10/20 years. Well, this book was not it. It's not good fiction writing. It's painfully obvious that the author is a journalist with maybe some prose ambitions. While it was interesting having a glimpse of Chinese and its everyday life and people (as an American journalist could tell it/see it), the layout of these short stories was awkward to say the least. Plus, it almost felt like the Chen thought that by adding weird, misplaced metaphores, her short stories would give a more "fictional" impression. Nope. I'm giving it three stars because, all in all, it was an interesting read and because of the last short story of the book. A short story with real potential, but, again, with an awkward execution.
