Unlike others who have read all of Tan's books, I have only had the pleasure of reading The Joy Luck Club. Just going off that book I found Saving Fish from Drowning to be quite different.

While it held true to Tan's brilliant, rich way of writing and continued her analysis of human nature and relationships, she seemed to step outside of her usual comfort zone and the whole tone of the book took on that of a political adventure. One thing that was particularly unique and enjoyable was our narrator. She was an actual character but having died before the story began gave her an omniscience that allowed the reader to see past the first person perspective.

The book was slow to start and there were so many characters that any time to get to know and bond with them never happened. Also, with the exception of Bibi, most of the characters were two demensional at best. That could have been remedied by allowing the reader more time to get to know the characters better.

Really, with all that being said, I think that's the extent of my review. I did like the book but I don't think it garnered any more praise or reflection than what I've given. A good book and from what I've heard from others it was a departure from Tan's usual writings of Chinese-American mother-daughter relationships. So if you like Tan's writing but want something different from her usual style you got it here. If you've never read any Amy Tan, though, starting with this book may give you a wrong (and disappointing) first impression.

I was ready for something other than mother-daughter relationships among Chinese and Chinese-Americans from Amy Tan (done very well in "The Kitchen God's Wife" and ok in "The Joy Luck Club"), but this was not it. The novel is narrated by the omniscient ghost of the recently-dead Bibi Chen, Chinese-American San Francisco art dealer, and tells the story of her 12 American friends who undertake a trip shortly after her funeral to China and Burma/Myanmar which she had planned for them. Bibi's voice is at first refreshingly opinionated, but comes to have no place in the story except to harp on the "typical bad American tourist" qualities of her caricatures of friends. The reader knows from page 1 that the tourists will depart from Bibi's original itinerary and wind up kidnapped in Burma/Myanmar, and the buildup to this actual event is excruciatingly long and boring, as the tourist group bumbles through several Chinese towns and various mishaps. Once the tourists are kidnapped (around page 300 of 474), the main theme of the book is finally developed (good intentions mixed with ignorance lead to bad results) and there are about 50 pages that are interesting, exploring the influence of global news exposure, American assumptions, diplomatic pressure and naive beliefs on the oppression of the Karen tribe in Burma/Myanmar by the military junta in power, but Tan's characters (both American and tribal Burmese) come across as simplistic idiots. I have no idea why the review on the back of the book talks about it being a story of hope, as I found it to be extremely depressing, with the Americans' actions having the worst consequences possible for others. The narrator's own life/death story is pointless and trite at the end of the book and the characters inspire no sympathy from the reader. Too bad, as there are a few interesting bits, but the reader is beaten over the head with the theme so many times that he/she fears becoming as stupid as the characters.

This book could’ve used a better editor - the middle dragged so much that it felt eternal! A lot of the same notes as Hundred Secret Senses, just not executed nearly as well.

Was a hard book to get started, but enjoyed it at the end.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news...


Author Tan back in the swim
'Fish' departs from Chinese-American tales, features Chaucer spin
Jenny Shank, Special to the News
Published October 28, 2005 at midnight

Amy Tan's last book, 2003's nonfiction collection The Opposite of Fate, closed with an essay about her struggle with Lyme disease. Tan described increasingly alarming symptoms, including joint pain, difficulty with organization, and visual hallucinations, and she left her fans with a cliff hanger: When she wrote that essay, it wasn't clear if she'd ever be able to write another novel.

With the publication of her new novel, Saving Fish from Drowning (her first since 2001's The Bonesetter's Daughter), Tan's admirers can breathe easy.

In a phone interview from her San Francisco home, Tan said that during the worst days of her illness, "It's like pieces of my brain were sand, just rolling out, and I felt I was trying to gather the sand before it completely leaked out."

She worried that she'd never be able to complete another book, but added, "What's kind of strange, however, is that you feel apathetic. I would be anxious about my not being able to think that well and work, but on the other hand, I didn't have the energy to fight it that much."

You might think that once Tan was finally diagnosed and began to improve, she would go easy on herself and tell a simple story, but shirking a challenge has never been her approach. Saving Fish from Drowning is a sprawling, 500-page tale with more than a dozen main characters and just as many plot lines. The book marks a departure for the author, as it's the first of her novels that doesn't largely focus on Chinese and Chinese-American characters and mother-daughter themes.

Instead, it tells the story of a group of 12 Americans of different ages, genders and ethnicities on a trip in China and Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), who end up trapped in the jungle village of a persecuted minority tribe.

A touch of the familiar Tan comes through in the voice of the deceased narrator, the dynamic Bibi Chen, a San Francisco art maven whose mysterious murder begins the tale. Chen is fictional, and all of the events in the novel are likewise products of Tan's imagination, but Tan's playful approach with the book's opening might leave some readers unsure.

In "A Note To The Reader," Tan describes an unusual event that sparked the book's creation. Caught in the rain in Manhattan, she writes, she ducked into a building called the "American Society for Psychical Research," where she found the "automatic writings" that a California woman claimed had been dictated to her by the spirit of Bibi Chen.

This tale sounds far-fetched enough for fiction, but anyone who has read The Opposite of Fate, replete with tales of bizarre spiritual occurrences in Tan's life, is primed to believe the author's reports of strange coincidences and ghosts.

"I wanted to start this book off with everything in there being a question of what's true and what's not true," Tan said. "So, for example, in the epigraph, you have something that was said by Camus that was truly something he said, and then you have a quote attributed to anonymous which was actually written by me."

Similarly, although there is a real American Society for Psychical Research, it contains no automatic writing that Tan used directly for the novel. When Tan visited the Society, she said, "there were files on automatic writing and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if a whole book were just sitting right there for me and I could just take it home and copy it?' So that part was made up, and the whole thing about Bibi Chen - that wasn't anybody that ever existed . . ."

"But the strange thing is," Tan continued, "I had a friend read this book early on, and he said, 'It's great that you actually knew this woman and that this all took place in your home town.' And I said, 'What are you talking about?' And he said, 'Well, you knew Bibi.' And I said, 'Bibi? You think she's real?' And he said, 'Well yes, of course.' And I said, 'Do you remember a story about a woman who was murdered in San Francisco who was really well known?' " said Tan, referring to her fictional backstory for Bibi Chen. "And he goes, 'Yeah, I think I do.' "

While Tan fashioned the book after Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, centered on 12 people who go on a journey, she also wanted to include her deceased mother in the story.

"I had just lost her just a few months before I finished The Bonesetter's Daughter, and suddenly I realized at the end of it that it wasn't that I had to write another mother-daughter story, but that my mother - her voice - could be the narrator. She could be the dead narrator, the dead travel guide, and she could have all that humor and wry observation and feistiness that my mother had and she could come along on the trip."

Although Tan wrote with the Canterbury Tales in mind, one of the few detectable traces of this influence is in the name of one character, Harry Bailley, who was the innkeeper in Chaucer's tales and surfaces as "a British-born celebrity dog trainer" in Tan's novel. "I don't think most people would catch that," Tan said. "These are little things that are more like postcards to myself. "

Another Chaucer-like touch is the humorous tone of Tan's novel: Although it begins with a murder and includes a host of misfortunes, the book is a fun read, and the overall effect is comic. Tan said the choice to leaven some of the serious underlying issues of the book - which touches on questions of human rights in Myanmar - was a conscious one.

"It's a comic novel because I wanted to address something that was very serious, something that disturbed me that was about morality and ignorance and intentions and about a situation in the world that is very, very sad," Tan said. "And the only way that I felt that I could approach it was with humor. Humor to me is a way of opening yourself up. . . you're not approaching a subject with extreme reverence that makes the complete picture impossible to see. With humor you just sort of shake loose everything that is in you and when you're opened up you can confront what is darker and harder to look at."

Much of this humor is conveyed through Bibi Chen's wry narration. Chen, who was supposed to be the group's tour guide before her murder, instead serves as a ghostly guide, keeping readers entertained with observations such as: "Throughout history, many a world leader was injudiciously influenced by his malfunctioning bladder, bowels, and other private parts. Didn't Napoleon lose at Waterloo because he couldn't sit in a saddle, on account of hemorrhoids?"

Saving Fish from Drowning is in large part a rollicking travel narrative, and Tan does a masterful job of capturing the unease Americans feel when traveling in countries where they don't understand the language, especially at border crossings and passport checks where scowling, armed officials often engage in "ten minutes of inspecting and stamping and huffing with authority."

Tan teases the reader with such scenes, by having Bibi state right away that the trip is going to go awry. But true to the book's comic tone, some of Bibi's most ominous foreshadowing presages a group bout of traveler's diarrhea. Tan said she included this event partly for "verisimilitude."

"I was recently going into the interior of China, and you're on a bus being jostled about for eight hours a day, bumping up and down and knocking your head into the window, and there were people having diarrhea. There's never been a trip I've been on that somebody did not have a problem like that. For me that just had to be in there because it would have been unrealistic to have nobody get sick."

Suspense builds throughout the book as the reader wonders what is going to become of these bumbling, very American travelers. Tan "wanted to bring the story to a point that I knew was going to be very uncomfortable," she said. "As they go further on this journey, they're going to encounter deeper and deeper moral issues for themselves," and become increasingly unsettled by the country's repressive regime.

With all of the confusion, cultural missteps, and ominous signs throughout the novel, the ending may surprise some readers. "What I hoped to get across is that we simply left the story off at a certain part of their (the characters') lives that is to me on some scale of happiness, probably right there about in the middle, and you don't know for certain which way their lives are going to go."

As for Tan's life, a year and a half ago she embarked on a project with the composer Stuart Wallace to reinterpret The Bonesetter's Daughter as an American opera. She estimates the opera will premier in 2008.

"What I've learned from all of it is that you cannot translate an original work to another form, to another medium. You have to really take it all apart and pare it down to literally its bones and then recast it and recreate it with the bones in a different configuration and give it its own life."

Tan is clearly back on her feet and making up for lost time. "I went through quite a period of struggle there," she admits, "and it really just took finally getting treatment so that my brain could come back. It was literally as though the fog had cleared when finally I started getting better."

I learned so much from this beautiful book full of laughter, hope and love.

This book has all the ingredients for a wonderful novel. And it almost succeeds. But, alas, it doesn't. It's a fine book, mind you, a page turner once you've gotten half way through, but Tan fails in a few specific ways. First, her characters are cartoonish and never really achieve Pinochian humanism. They are characterizations of generally the worst, shallowest of human characteristics. Granted, a book has only so much room and Tan tries to fill it with many characters but she either tries too hard or doesn't try hard enough. The next problem I had was with her pace. It took forever to get involved with the story and once hooked the play was jerky and sporadic. A scene might take 20 pages and then in the next page a weeks resolution would be quickly wrapped up. It left me jumpy. The rushed ending and "clever" tying-up at the end left me cold as well. Tan paints a picture of a unique place, Myanmar, and unique circumstances but a veteran like her should have told a smoother story.

"In recent years, I have looked more often at my intentions. What inconsistent hodgepodge of my unexamined religious, social, political and moral beliefs has served as my unconscious guide? From that melange, what have I selected as my beliefs and how well do they stand up to scrutiny, daily application and emergency use? Which beliefs have I never questioned? Should I now? How malleable are they? What do I use to chip away such assumptions?"

Disappointing. Not Amy Tan's usual exceptional quality.

A lot of reviewers say that this book is a departure from a lot of aspects of Tan's usual style, and while I found that in some aspects, I still think there were a lot of her typical elements - just not as she usually uses them.

The characters were completely frustrating, but they were meant to be - the commentary on the West's relationship (and interference with) Myanmar, North American fixation on tourism to countries in order to "help" these "less fortunate" countries, without any knowledge of the country or the damage you're doing.

I did find that there were too many characters - I feel like if Roxanne, Dwight and Vera didn't exist, the story would not have changed at all. Even some of the other characters didn't really have an impact on the story, which to me was a big departure from Tan's usual character development.

Esta novela de Amy Tan es diferente a otras que ha escrito. No está ambientada en China y muchos de sus protagonistas no son chinos.
Y sin embargo, mantiene su esencia, ese tono amargo a la vez que realista sobre la realidad que tanto me gusta.
Un grupo de amigos viaja a Asia (desde Estados Unidos) y por diversos azares terminan perdidos en una selva de Birmania, acogidos por una tribu indígena. Allí aprenderán el verdadero valor de las cosas, pero sobre todo de los sentimientos y de las relaciones.
Sin embargo, el aprendizaje (en alguno de los casos) no tendrá el poso que se podía esperar,...

Oh Good Lord! What an awful waste of time!

This was a torture to finish, but I was really holding out for an ending that would make the misery worth while. But nay - that was not to be the case.

Here was an opportunity for a dozen world travelers to have an adventure. And they may have had one, but it HAD to be more interesting than the telling we got from Amy. Even the sexual escapades were boring. How can that be? How were these people so boring AND so gullible?

The characters were not believeable, the plot was not believeable, the fact that none of them died of boredom was not believeable. Younger White Brother? Why not exploit that one a bit more.

I guess I should have known - another story told from the perspective of a ghost. I guess the dead but not crossed over just aren't very good story tellers.

Wonderful read! Amy Tan writes amazing stories and this was from start to finish a well written and engaging work. I loved the concept of the story and the characters. Highly recommend.