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In this deeply stirring novel, acclaimed author Cristina Garc�a follows one extraordinary family through four generations, from China to Cuba to America. Wonderfully evocative of time and place, rendered in the lyrical prose that is Garc�a’s hallmark, Monkey Hunting is an emotionally resonant tale of immigration, assimilation, and the prevailing integrity of self.
- Sales Rank: #387851 in Books
- Brand: Ballantine Books
- Published on: 2004-04-27
- Released on: 2004-04-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .60" w x 5.20" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Features
From Publishers Weekly
The Chinese-Cuban experience is plumbed in this graceful third novel by Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban; The Aguero Sisters), encompassing five far-flung generations, four countries and two tumultuous centuries. Farm boy Chen Pan leaves his native China in 1857, dreaming of the riches awaiting him in mysterious Cuba. Instead, he is obliged to work on a sugarcane plantation, subjected to the atrocities of forced servitude in a country that is not his own and in which he is viewed with suspicion. He eventually manages to escape and creates a life for himself beyond his wildest dreams, as a successful small-business owner, beloved husband and doting father. Becoming almost more Cuban than Chinese, he falls in love with Lucrecia, a former slave. His mixed-blood descendants, scattered between Cuba and China, struggle to find their place in a world that strives to keep its ethnic and geographical boundaries distinct. Chen Fang, a granddaughter raised as a boy in China, is a remarkable woman who manages to get an education and become a teacher, eventually landing in one of Mao's appalling prisons in 1970 Shanghai. As a teenager, great-grandson Domingo Chen departs Cuba for New York with his father and faces the same hostility and racism there that Chen Pan dealt with in mid-19th-century Havana. Domingo's journey from Cuba to New York then Vietnam is told in unsparing detail, bringing the novel full circle. Though Garcia ranges farther afield here than in previous works, her prose is as tight and polished as ever. The book is rather short for its span, and a bit more development of some characters-particularly Chen Fang-would have been welcome, but that is a mere quibble. Garcia's novel is a richly patterned mini-epic, a moving chorus of distinct voices.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Garcia, of Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Aguero Sisters (1997) renown, writes pristinely lyrical and enchanting prose, and creates powerfully alluring characters, delectable qualities she takes to new heights in this many-faceted tale about an extended Chinese Cuban family. The novel begins in China in 1857 when Chen Pan is tricked into indentured servitude and shipped to Cuba where he is sold as a slave and put to work cutting sugar cane. Strong and resilient, he eventually escapes and becomes a successful and upright Havana businessman who gallantly liberates a mulatto slave, Lucrecia, and her infant son. In between passages devoted to Chen Pan and Lucrecia, who eventually become lovers, Garcia travels back to China to tell the harrowing tale of Chen Fang--an unwanted third daughter disguised as a son in her youth and deprived of everything she holds dear as an adult once the communists come to power--then moves on to 1960s Vietnam, where Domingo, the son of a Chinese Cuban herbalist, barely survives the war. Gorgeously detailed and entrancingly told, erotic, mystical, and wise, Garcia's bittersweet saga of a family of remarkable individuals spans a century of displacement, war, and sacrifice, and a world of forbearance and love. Donna Seaman
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“A miracle of poetic compression . . . With the confidence of an artist who knows exactly what can be left out, Garc�a has made a small masterpiece—an epic of anecdotes, a vista of brief and beautiful glimpses.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Garc�a combines her gorgeous writing with a relentless view of history and a fierce understanding of the degree to which the individual life is at the mercy of larger forces.”
—The Atlantic
“Monkey Hunting demonstrates that Ms. Garc�a can write just as persuasively about men as she has about women, and it signals her ambition to broaden her canvas, to explore in detail not only her characters’ inner lives but also the great public events that shape their daily existences.”
—The New York Times
“A miracle of poetic compression . . . With the confidence of an artist who knows exactly what can be left out, Garc�a has made a small masterpiece—an epic of anecdotes, a vista of brief and beautiful glimpses.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Garc�a combines her gorgeous writing with a relentless view of history and a fierce understanding of the degree to which the individual life is at the mercy of larger forces.”
—The Atlantic
“Monkey Hunting demonstrates that Ms. Garc�a can write just as persuasively about men as she has about women, and it signals her ambition to broaden her canvas, to explore in detail not only her characters’ inner lives but also the great public events that shape their daily existences.”
—MICHIKO KAKUTANI,
The New York Times
“RADIANT . . . MESMERIZING . . .
A LOVING EXPLORATING OF HERITAGE . . .
Garc�a’s grasp of atmosphere is nonpareil and the physicality of her scene setting is intoxicating . . . Garc�a writes so well, she puts the reader in the room with her characters. . . . Monkey Hunting is a novel of great scope.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“An epic tearjerker . . . The story spans two continents, four generations, several wars, and the rise of two terrible dictators [yet] the focus always remains on the characters, a family of downtrodden dreamers. . . . Garc�a’s luminous prose makes palpable the pang of homesickness, the gut-punch of heartbreak. By the end, we are both exhausted from her characters’ incredible journeys and buoyed by their strengths.”
—Time Out New York
“Garc�a employs an exuberant prose style in which even the smallest of her torrent of details come heavily jeweled. . . . Escape, family ties, luck, the pull of the homeland—these Garc�a trademarks serve here as background and texture to another, more singular matter of the fully lived life.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Such is the force of Garc�a’s sensual, warm, witty prose [that] I was happy to follow wherever she led . . . . I soon found myself deeply attached to both major and minor characters.”
— The Atlantic
“GORGEOUSLY DETAILED AND ENTRANCINGLY TOLD,
EROTIC, MYSTICAL, AND WISE,
Garc�a’s bittersweet saga of a family of remarkable individuals spans a century of displacement, war, and sacrifice, and a world of forbearance and love. . . . [Garc�a] writes pristinely lyrical and enchanting prose, and creates powerfully alluring characters, delectable qualities she takes to new heights in this many-faceted tale about an extended Chinese Cuban family.”
—Booklist
“Up to now, [Garc�a’s] most formidable and affecting characters . . . have been women, extravagant creatures of ripe, even frenzied passions who bloom from the page as colorful as hibiscus blossoms and as huge as Amazons . . . and happily, Monkey Hunting swells their ranks by two.”
—Miami Herald
“[Garc�a] paints a vivid picture of her native Havana, both before and after Castro came to power. . . . Although few Chinese remain in Cuba, their legacy remains in Havana’s Chinatown. Garc�a’s eloquent novel is a fitting tribute to their lives.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Elegantly written . . . In this multi-generational saga, which embraces many cultures and spans more than a century, Cristina Garc�a demonstrates how much the human spirit can endure.”
—Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer
“Graceful . . . Told in unsparing detail . . . Though Garc�a ranges further afield here than in previous works, her prose is as tight and polished as ever. . . . [Her] novel is a richly patterned mini-epic, a moving chorus of distinct voices.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A VIVID FAMILY SAGA . . .
GARC�A WRITES BEAUTIFULLY.”
—Austin American-Statesman
“An expert sense of timing and pace . . . This slim book lodges so deeply under the skin. In describing the sensual world, Garc�a depicts her characters’ experiences so luminously that it’s easy to feel the pang of their homesickness, the oomph of their heartbreak.”
—The Boston Sunday Globe
“Garc�a has a rare gift for concentrating beauty by leaving things out. Here is . . . a novel that manages to trace four generations of a family not by revealing every last detail of personal histories but rather by revealing people’s dreams, their unuttered concerns and observations. . . . Whether she’s writing about the food stalls in Chinatown, the lovingly tended graves in the city’s Chinese cemetery, or even the absurd assortment of curios in the Lucky Find, Garc�a savors her descriptions and never rushes through any of them, carefully building for us a Havana of cinematic vividness, detail by shimmering detail.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“In Monkey Hunting, author Cristina Garc�a does again what she is so adept at: guiding the reader through multiple generations of well-fleshed characters moving through time and place. . . . Monkey Hunting [is] a sensuous mosaic of fierce struggles to survive in new worlds.
This worthy novel deserves a broad audience.”
—The Oregonian
“A provocative, generational story.”
—Desert News (Salt Lake City, UT)
“FIERCE AND INTOXICATING . . . VIVIDLY IMAGINED . . . MONKEY HUNTING IS A LUCKY FIND, INDEED.”
—Miami Herald
“Garc�a [is] a literary daughter mindful of her magic realist inheritance but maintaining a rebellious, streetwise edge all her own.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Visceral, poetic, fantastic . . . Sit back. Take it in. Read Monkey Hunting for its high-octane poetry, its cocktail of color and incident, its rat-a-tat-tat of vigorous verbs, and Isabel Allende–style eroticism. . . . Glorious images born of a writer who has a gift for splicing together unexpected scenes, cultures, and similes.”
—Chicago Tribune
“At once dreamlike and historically accurate, lushly written and bristling with harsh human truths.”
—L.A. Weekly
“DEEPLY AFFECTING . . . A POWERFUL, ANCHORING STORY OF ORDINARY LOVE . . . Chen Pan [is] a Chinese wheat farmer whom we first meet in 1857 as he boards a ship in the hope of prosperity and winds up enslaved on a Cuban sugar plantation. His brazen escape from his captors and ultimate success as a Havana businessman become a story told down the generations. . . . [His] granddaughter Chen Fang, born in China and educated like a boy, gives up her only child for a chance to teach literature. . . . [His] grandson Domingo Chen escapes Castro’s Cuba with his physically and emotionally ruined father, embraces the myriad seductions of New York City and . . . delivers himself to the hell of the Vietnam War. . . . Havana’s street life, Vietnam’s whorehouses, China’s staid interiors are meticulously rendered, visceral, [and] fully alive.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Garc�a is an immensely talented writer whose work, like that of Jessica Hagedorn, Sherman Alexie, and David Foster Wallace, is renewing American fiction.”
—The Nation
“A POWERFUL, ANCHORING STORY OF ORDINARY LOVE . . . Chen Pan [is] a Chinese wheat farmer whom we first meet in 1857 as he boards a ship in the hope of prosperity and winds up enslaved on a Cuban sugar plantation. His brazen escape from his captors and ultimate success as a Havana businessman become a story told down the generations.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Too short!
By Lynn Harnett
In her first novel in six years, National Book Award nominee Garcia ("Dreaming in Cuban") explores the Chinese-Cuban experience across the span of four generations and more than a century. The novel opens in 1857 China. Impoverished, childless farmer Chen Pan, looking for work in the city, agrees to exchange his daily struggle for dreams of riches and adventure in exotic, tropical Cuba.
Crammed into the hold of a stinking boat with similarly tricked men, Chen realizes he has failed his duty to his wife and mother. Chen endures, but lack of food, water, space, and hope drive others to suicide. When a melon grower jumps overboard, "the furling waves received him with indifference. The melon-grower had been an orphan and a bachelor. No destiny would be altered but his."
Chen is sold into eight years indentured servitude cutting sugar cane. He and the other Chinese men live as slaves among the African slaves, sharing in their beatings and body-breaking work. After killing a brutal overseer, falling in love with a slave who is raped and sold, and witnessing the recapture and mutilation of a group of Chinese escapees, Chen escapes and hides in the woods.
At this point the novel jumps to New York City in 1968 where Domingo Chen and his father are trying to survive on menial jobs after fleeing Castro's Cuba. His father mired in depression, Domingo lives day to day, chasing girls and sharpening his wardrobe.
Though Garcia soon returns to Chen - who establishes a successful second-hand shop in Havana, buys and frees a slave woman, Lucrecia, and her child - the riveting bond between character and reader has loosened and the novel has changed. Garcia moves between old Chen and his descendants - the granddaughter in China he never knows he has, his herbalist doctor son Lorenzo, who returns to China to study for 10 years, Lorenzo's sons, Domingo and his tour in Vietnam. The book is now more about the immigrant experience, the dreams, heartbreaks, the mingling of blood and traditions, than it is about one man or even one family.
Chen is a complex, deliberative character, a gentle, steely man with an edge of desperation who embraces his life with passion, all the more ardent for its depths of regret, fear, ambition and loneliness. Lucrecia, too, is fully, deftly developed and their love is memorable, almost heroic in its quiet consideration. But the other characters, despite Garcia's empathy, and the clarity of the spare, telling, vignettes, remain acquaintances. There simply isn't room enough in this 250-page novel.
But so beautifully does Garcia write and so dramatic are the times and crises she portrays, that this is almost a quibble. She brings alive a thought-provoking world of change, culture, dreams and cross-culture melding. The novel will grip you even if its individuals don't.
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Hungry ghost
By Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader
Cristina Garcia gathers the Cuban-Chinese experience up in her graceful embrace in this lovely novel that covers more than a century and a family�s adventures in Cuba, China, the US, and Vietnam. This is a slim book to take in so much, and I was left wanting more, more, more.
Garcia is an elegant writer who creates characters you immediately like and care about, and then doesn�t give you enough to leave you happy. The most satisfying section of �Monkey Hunting� is the first part, where Chen Pan leaves his village to make his way in the world. He ends up a slave in Cuba, cutting cane until he escapes and through hard work and luck sets up a second-hand shop called the Lucky Find. He marries a former slave, and a dynasty is born. Chen Pan and. Lucrecia are wonderful creations, and the world of Havana�s Barrio Chino is so filled with fascinating Chinese Cubans that it would be a pleasure to stay there awhile and really get to know them. However, we seem to be only touching down here and there, never lighting very long in one place. Chen Pan�s granddaughter Chen Fang gets especially short shrift, a shame because as a woman who is raised as a boy, becomes a teacher and a secret lover of women, and ultimately a victim of the Cultural Revolution, her story is certainly an interesting one. And what about Domingo Chen, who flees Castro�s Cuba to come to New York and go to war in Vietnam? A great story. Tell me more.
�Monkey Hunting� could easily be twice as long and still maintain Garcia�s high standards. In this shorter format she packs her prose beautifully, telling us a great deal with little. She undermines herself by being so good at imagining characters that the reader longs for more details, situations, and background than she seems to be willing to give.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Monkey never found!
By J. Lindsay Donigan
After reading Garcia's previous books, which are exceptional, "Monkey Hunting" was a huge disappointment. The premise, a Chinese family living in Cuba through the generations, is an interesting one, but the scope is too broad. The result is that all the characters and events are one-dimensional. The backtracking between Cuba, China, New York and Vietnam in different time periods is confusing to the reader and the sum total does not add up to the same number as its parts. I recommend you pass on this one.
See all 15 customer reviews...
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