Rating: 
Summary: Amy Tan in her own voice
Review: "The Opposite of Fate" is a collection of musings that cover the many facets of Amy Tan's life, career, and philosophies. The book runs the gamut from a library contest entry written when she was eight to articles and lectures about her current life as a writer. These essays are quite personal, honest, and told with humor and amazing insight. Tan reminisces on her childhood and the clash of Chinese fate and Christian faith in her upbringing. She provides many details about her family, especially her relationship with her mother. She also talks about the loss of both her father and brother to brain cancer the same year, as well as the deaths of several close friends. She describes her harrowing experience with Lyme's disease. She talks with amusement about doctoral dissertations and Cliff's Notes that analyze her work. She discusses what it means to be classified as an Asian-American writer, and how it feels to be a literary celebrity. She recounts her experiences in the literary rock band "The Rock Bottom Remainders." I listened to the audio version of this book, which was read by Amy Tan herself. Since this collection let me peek into the author's triumphs, tragedies, hopes, and fears, it was very effective to hear the essays read in her own voice. After reading this book, you will better understand the elements that make up the author's stories, such as the echoes of her mother's influence in the novels' mother-daughter relationships. I recommend this book for every Amy Tan fan. It may provide enough insight on the real Amy Tan so that you'll want to reread some of her novels. Eileen Rieback
Rating:
Summary: Amy Tan in her own voice
Review: "The Opposite of Fate" is a collection of musings that cover the many facets of Amy Tan's life, career, and philosophies. The book runs the gamut from a library contest entry written when she was eight to articles and lectures about her current life as a writer. These essays are quite personal, honest, and told with humor and amazing insight. Tan reminisces on her childhood and the clash of Chinese fate and Christian faith in her upbringing. She provides many details about her family, especially her relationship with her mother. She also talks about the loss of both her father and brother to brain cancer the same year, as well as the deaths of several close friends. She describes her harrowing experience with Lyme's disease. She talks with amusement about doctoral dissertations and Cliff's Notes that analyze her work. She discusses what it means to be classified as an Asian-American writer, and how it feels to be a literary celebrity. She recounts her experiences in the literary rock band "The Rock Bottom Remainders." I listened to the audio version of this book, which was read by Amy Tan herself. Since this collection let me peek into the author's triumphs, tragedies, hopes, and fears, it was very effective to hear the essays read in her own voice. After reading this book, you will better understand the elements that make up the author's stories, such as the echoes of her mother's influence in the novels' mother-daughter relationships. I recommend this book for every Amy Tan fan. It may provide enough insight on the real Amy Tan so that you'll want to reread some of her novels. Eileen Rieback
Rating: 
Summary: The Opposite of Fiction
Review: Although I read only the rare novel, I really love it when a novelist tries her hand at non-fiction. Fiction writers turn everything into stories. The essays and memories in The Opposite of Fate read like short stories, with the pacing and structure of fiction. This is not a memoir, rather a collection of thoughts, essays, interviews, memories, even a prize-winning essay Amy Tan wrote when she was eight years old. The pieces at the beginning of the book are more light-hearted than the later ones. In one, Tan is surprised to find that Joy Luck Club has a CliffNotes version and is interested to discover what she was trying to say in her novel. Not only that, the CliffNotes biography doesn't quite match what she recalls from her own life. In another chapter, Tan tells how she became a bad singer in the Rock Bottom Remainders, a bad band. Her story of how Joy Luck Club was made into a movie is fascinating. There is a lot about Tan's mother, a huge influence in her life, both good and bad. When Tan turns serious, watch out. She has had several brushes with death, and her September 11 memories are out of the ordinary, as well. She also writes about how she came to be a writer and have her first novel published at thirty-seven. Most of these pieces are quickly read, and only one or two seem seemed too long. I am embarrassed to say that I have not read the novels of Amy Tan, but having finished this very enjoyable "Book of Musings," I look forward to getting her other books right away.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant AMERICAN writer
Review: Before reading this book, I had never read anything by Amy Tan.
This book was thought-provoking and incredibly enjoyable. Amy Tan is an interesting person and a wonderful writer - a word craftsman. Amy grew up Chinese-American on the west coast. I am an Italian/Catholic-Jewish-American from New York City. Yet, I feel a strong kinship with her. Her childhood could have been mine.
Rating: 
Summary: The Opposite of Good Editing
Review: I have enjoyed Amy Tan's books so I was looking forward to reading this one. There are some fine moments, but in general the book is a pastiche of old e-mails, older writings, and there is a lot of repetitious material. There doesn't seem to be any direction, rhyme or reason as to why certain items were included (or excluded). The book has a strong beginning but by the end, I didn't feel the author had shared much with us that wasn't divulged before.
Rating:
Summary: A touching self-revelation with wit and emotion
Review: I have read all of Amy Tan's books, and I think that she is a brilliant writer because although she writes mainly from her life experiences, stories from her mother, and her own imagination, she takes you back to different parts of China during different periods of time while putting you on an emotional roller coaster to find a balance in life. What is the meaning of life? Tan knows that no one really knows the real answer, IF there is a real answer. In this book, Tan reveals her stressful childhood in which her mother was very unstable and always threatened suicide. Since both her father and brother died from brain tumors within a year, her mother knew that fate was on their wrong side when she counted that nine bad things had happened in her life (see the reference in BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER). She reveals that although she uses many experiences from her and her mother's lives in her novels, she only bases her novels on the stories. The novels are fiction, not biographies. She talks of her fear of death since when she was six years old and saw a class mate in a coffin, her mom muttering to her, "This what happens when don't listen to mother!" She realizes that she is very lucky to be an author, and that fate must keep her alive since she has had many near death experiences. Yet at the end of the book, she comes to the realization that it is not fate that determines her life. It is a very touching book, filled with parts of speeches and writings that will make you laugh, shiver, cry, and have sympathy for this brilliant woman. I think that anyone who reads this book can relate to Tan and her hard life (she actually thinks she has had a great, lucky life and is very optimistic). The reason why Tan uses the mother-daughter theme so much in her novels and short stories is because that is what she knows. That is what is important to her. That's like Steven King uses horror as his theme, etc. It's a page-turner- you won't be able to put it down!
Rating:
Summary: An Enjoyable Read
Review: I highly recommend this book simply because it was so enjoyable. I enjoyed the very candid look into Amy's life and how her past has shaped her present. She's an awesome storyteller.
Rating:
Summary: A thoughtful and fun read
Review: I just finished reading this book and really it is very different from any other Amy Tam work. Her voice is so explicitly loud and funny that this book is worth your time even if your aren't a major Amy Tan fan. All the way through she will challenge you to think about writing and life in different ways. As a special bonus, I think I gained alot of insight into her earlier works that casts them in a different light for me.
Rating:
Summary: Fate and Faith...interesting analogy.
Review: I started reading this book because I thought it would be one of her fictions, but it's not. I kept on reading it and I was happy to discover that Tan and I come from the same elements of familial woes. It was strangely pleasant because I felt like part of my own life was unfolding in this book. She gives vivid descriptions of her life: why she writes, her early fascination with Nabokov, her own views on being classified as an "Asian American" writer, her torrid relationship with her mother, the deaths of her brother, father, and friend, etc. Amy Tan was recently diagnosed with Lyme's disease, a neurological ailment caused by nymph ticks. She talks about finding hope in the deeper self, even though her whole immediate family has been haunted and devoured by neurological illnesses (brain tumors, Alzheimer's). All in all, I think this book offers an introduction to Amy Tan as a writer, as an individual. And I find the "mystical" and coincidental ways in which some of her works come to being particularly intriguing, or perhaps contrived (?). It will not take you long though, to discover that she uses melodrama in a morbid, but titillating way.
The book touches all sorts of subjects. From fear and faith, to fate and mortality. It candidly corrects the misconceptions and assumptions that have been seculated by the media and become part of Tan's "unofficial biography", as she terms it.
Of all readers, I think that this book will be appreciated by her truest and most loyal fans. In this book of "musings", Tan is explaining and uncovering her personality as a writer...as if to let her own beloved readers know who she really is.
The only reason that I give this book four stars is because three or four of the sections in this book made me want to sleep. They were somewhat slow and boring, which is really not rare in such books that try to touch on every single topic. I also felt like Tan could have made her sentences a little more colorful, and embellished some of her paragraphs in some of the sections. It was a good job otherwise.
Rating:
Summary: Aptly titled uneven collection
Review: I suppose one shouldn't expect much from a book titled "Musings", and truth be told, I didn't rush out to pick this one up as I usually do with Tan's works based simply on that title--it seemed to advertise too clearly that there really wasn't going to be much here. Now that I've read it, I have to say my instinctive reaction to the title was correct. While there are some good pieces here, none are really exemplary, many are simply solid, and some don't even quite attain that standard. While most collections by their nature tend to be somewhat uneven, this one leaned more toward the weak side.
Part of the problem, I think, is that I had no sense of a larger narrative or overarching theme or vision. I wouldn't expect that from a simple anthology, such as Best American Short Stories (of which Tan's intro for is included), but from a single author, even if they have a variety of styles and themes, one usually walks away with a sense of a single voice. While Tan focuses a lot on three major topics--her relationship with her mother, visions of herself as a writer through her eyes and others', and her own mortality, they never really hang together; the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and the sum of its parts doesn't really add up to too much as it is.
Another problem for fans of Tan is that some of this may be too much treading over similar water, though if your information about her is based on internet "research", as she points out in a witty section, you may know less about her than you think you do.
The pieces are all pretty straightforward, in style, structure, tone, and intent. It would have been nice to have broken up some of that with some more daring pieces, or pieces that were just different. Because so many of these are reprints (including an essay she wrote when she was eight. Of interest perhaps, worth including in a collection not so sure), she is somewhat limited in what she could do, but all the more reason to have sat down and written some new pieces.
The sections on her mother are so plainly written and sometimes in so much relation to her novels or her writing that they seem of interest only in regard to her writing. Unlike, for instance, one of the better and shorter pieces where she relates a time her boyfriend and family came to her house for dinner. In its brevity, its independence, and its humor, it stands out for its refreshing nature--more of that would have strengthened the collection.
The writing pieces again are so straightforward in their style and message (don't expect me to represent "minority culture" or "this is how I wrote . . . ) that while they hold some interest in terms of content, they are not particularly compelling. One gets the point relatively soon and since the writing doesn't hold much interest, neither does the rest of the piece once you've gotten the point.
The essay on her long-delayed diagnosis and struggle with Lyme's Disease is tragic, but told in a point-by-point, day-by-day fashion so that it reads almost more like a third-person article in a weekly magazine than a first-person essay. I felt the tragedy intellectually, rather than have it created by the writing on page.
There are a few strong pieces here, mostly I thought the shorter ones. And in the longer essays some strong sections. And the content, as I've said, is interesting if not compelling. Mostly it feels like a nice comfort meal. It leaves feeling not hungry, but you also don't feel like you've really eaten. What's missing is a sense of taste, of flavor, of richness: richness of style, of structure (especially in counterpoint to her novels), of language. All of which one expects from Tan based on her novels. I confess to feeling a bit uneasy in this criticism, as her last essay makes clear writing has been difficult if not impossible for her for quite some time. So maybe this book is simply a placeholder for both her and her publisher, a reminder that she's still "out there" working. In the end, she says that there are more of those "golden days" when the writing comes more fully; I hope those days continue to increase in frequency so that we'll once again be rewarded with the fullness of voice we've come to depend on.
|
