The Binding Chair: or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		The Binding Chair: or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society
		The Binding Chair: or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society

基本信息·出版社：Harper Perennial
·页码：336 页
·出版日期：2001年07月
·ISBN：0060934425
·International Standard Book Number：0060934425
·条形码：9780060934422
·EAN：9780060934422
·装帧：平装
·正文语种：英语

内容简介 在线阅读本书

In poised and elegant prose, Kathryn Harrison weaves a stunning story of women, travel, and flight; of love, revenge, and fear; of the search for home and the need to escape it. Set in alluring Shanghai at the turn of the century, The Binding Chair intertwines the destinies of a Chinese woman determined to forget her past and a Western girl focused on the promises of the future.

From the Inside Flap In poised and elegant prose, Kathryn Harrison weaves in The Binding Chair; or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society a stunning story of women, travel, and flight; of love, revenge, and fear; of the search for home and the need to escape it. Set in alluring Shanghai at the turn of the century, The Binding Chair intertwines the destinies of a Chinese woman determined to forget her past and a Western girl focused on the promises of the future.

Beautiful, charismatic, destructive, May escapes an ar-ranged marriage in rural nineteenth-century China for life in a Shanghai brothel, where she meets Arthur, an Australian whose philanthropic pursuits lead him into one scrape after another. As a member of the Foot Emancipation Society, Arthur calls on May not for his pleasure but for her rehabilitation, only to find himself immediately and helplessly seduced by the sight of her bound feet. Reforming May is out of the question, so love-struck Arthur marries her instead and brings her home to live with him, his sister and brother-in-law, and their two girls, Alice and Cecily. In Alice, May sees the possibility of redemption: a surrogate for a child she has lost. And it is to May that Alice turns for the love her own mother withholds. But when the twelve-year-old is caught preparing her aunt's opium pipe, she is shipped off to a London boarding school, far from the dangerous influence of the woman who will come to reclaim her and to control the whole family.

The Binding Chair unfolds among scenes of astonishing beauty and cruelty, in a lawless place where traditions and cultures clash, and where tragedy threatens a world built on the banks of unsettled waters--from the bustling Whangpoo River to the lake of blood in the Chinese afterworld. By turns shocking, exquisite, and hilarious, The Binding Chair is another spellbinding literary triumph by the writer whose work Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times has called "powerful and hypnotic." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
作者简介 Kathryn Harrison is the author of the novels Thicker Than Water, Exposure, and Poison. She has also written the best selling memoir, The Kiss.

Her personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and other publications.

She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their children.

You can contact Kathryn at the bindingchair@yahoo.com

媒体推荐 APPRENTICESHIP

The gatepost, stuccoed pink to match the villa, bore a glazed tile painted with a blue number, the same as that in the advertisement. Please inquire in person. Avenue des Fleurs, 72.

A hot day, and so bright. Sun flared off windowpanes and wrung sparks from freshly watered shrubs. One after another, applicants paused at the locked gate, considered its wrought-iron flourishes and the distinctly self-satisfied hue of the residence glimpsed through its bars. They checked the number twice, as if lost, hesitated before pushing the black button in its burnished ring of brass.

When the houseboy appeared with a ring of keys, his severely combed hair shining with petroleum jelly, they ducked in response to his bow and followed him through the silently swinging gate with their heads still lowered, squinting dizzily at the glittering crushed white quartz that lined the rose beds along the path.

"Won't you sit down?"

May received them in the sunroom. Behind her chair, glass doors offered a view of terraced back gardens, an avalanche of extravagantly bright blooms, a long, blue-tiled swimming pool that splattered its reflection over the white walls and ceiling.

Of the eleven men and women who answered her notice, four did not resist staring at May outright, and she dismissed them immediately.

Whatever the name Mrs. Arthur Cohen might suggest to someone answering an ad, May would not have been it. To begin with, wasn't Cohen a Jewish name? And there she was, unmistakably Chinese. Now who in 1927 had encountered such an intermarriage, even among the Riviera's population of gamblers and gigolos, its yachtsmen and consumptives and inexhaustible reserves of deposed, transient countesses living off pawned tiaras? In the summer months, when sun worshippers overtook the city of Nice-women walking bare-legged on the boulevards, and bare-lipped, too, tennis skirts no lower than the knee and not a smudge of lipstick, their hair bobbed, their necks brown and muscular, canine-May Cohen looked not so much out of style as otherworldly.

Despite the heat, she received her eleven candidates in traditional dress: a mandarin coat of pink silk embroidered with a pattern of cranes and fastened with red frogs, matching pink trousers, and tiny silk shoes that stuck out from under their hems like two pointed red tongues.

Her abundant and absolutely black hair was coiled in a chignon. Pulled back, it accentuated a pretty widow's peak, a forehead as pale and smooth as paper. Her eyes were black and long, each brow a calligraphic slash; her full lips were painted red. She had a narrow nose with nervous, delicate nostrils, imperious, excitable nostrils that seemed to have been formed with almost fanatical attention. But each part of May-her cuticles and wristbones and earlobes, the blue-white luminous hollow between her clavicles-inspired the same conclusion: that to assemble her had required more than the usual workaday genius of biology. At fifty, her beauty was still so extreme as to be an affront to any sensible soul. Her French, like her English, was impeccable.

Of the remaining seven applicants (those who did not disqualify themselves by staring), the first offered references from a local sanitarium. Perhaps this explained his solicitousness, his tender careful moist gaze, as if she were moribund. "Please accept my apologies," she said. "You won't do."

The second was, she decided, an idiot. "You have had-it was an accident? " he asked, and she smiled, but not kindly.

The third, a narrow, ascetic Swiss with an inexpertly sewn harelip and a carefully mended coat, looked as if she needed employment. But she wrinkled her nose with fastidious disapproval, and May rang for the houseboy to see her out.

The fourth's excitement as he glimpsed the tightly bound arch of May's right foot, his damp hands and posture of unrestrained anticipation: these presaged trouble. May uncrossed her legs, she stood and bid him a good afternoon.

The fifth and sixth changed their minds.

The seventh, who was the last, would have to do. He was taciturn; and that, anyway, she approved.

"When do I start?" was his longest utterance.

"Today," May said. "Now." And the houseboy provided him with bathing costume, towel, and robe, a room in which to change.

May, using her jade cane, slowly climbed the stairs to her suite of rooms, where she took off all her clothes except the white binding cloths and red shoes-for without them she couldn't walk at all-and put on her new black bathing costume. She pulled the pins from her hair, brushed and braided it, and, wearing a white robe so long that it trailed, began her long walk down the stairs. On the way she met Alice, her niece, breathless and ascending two at a time.

"I'm late," Alice explained, unnecessarily. And then, "Please!" as May blocked her way with her cane.

"For what?" May asked. "For whom?"

"I'm meeting him at the Negresco. We're having tea, that's all, so don't let's quarrel." Alice tried to push past, but May held the cane firmly across the banister. "Look, he'll think I'm not coming!"

"Just remember." May pointed the tip of her cane at Alice's heart. "We all die alone."

"Please! I haven't time for this now!" Alice made an exasperated lunge for the cane, which May abruptly lowered so that Alice lost her balance; she ended sitting on the step below her aunt's feet.

May looked down at her. "I'm more fortunate than you."

"And why is that?" The words came out tartly, and Alice scowled, she stuck her chin out belligerently; still, she considered her aunt remarkable for the tragedies she'd survived.

"Because," May said. "Opium is a better drug."

"Well," Alice said, after an amplified sigh. She stood up. "Any advice?" she asked, sarcastic.

May shrugged. She raised her perfectly symmetrical eyebrows and turned up an empty white palm. "Avoid marriage," she said. "Obviously." She continued down the stairs, Alice watching as she navigated the foyer, her white robe trailing over the parquet, her abbreviated steps invisible, disguised. Through the salon and out to the pool: who could guess how she hobbled?

In the garden, on a chaise he'd pulled from the shade of an umbrella into the afternoon sun, the young man was waiting. Sprawled long-legged on its yellow cushion, the robe folded, unused, at its foot, he opened his eyes at the sound of the patio door; he stood as May approached. A low stool had been placed just at the very lip of tile that overhung the stairs descending to the shallow end of the long blue pool, and May sat on it. The young man watched in silence as she untied the sash of her robe and pulled her white arms from its white sleeves, let it fall back from her shoulders before bending to unbind her feet.

Because she was so graceful in all her movements, the clumsiness with which she entered the pool surprised him. Still, the young man said nothing, he made no move to help May as she used her arms to maneuver herself from the low seat to the edge of the pool and from there onto the steps.

For a moment she rested on the highest one, submerged only as far as her waist and looking into the water. Under the pool's refracting surface her feet appeared no more foreshortened than any other woman's.




She turned to him, her hand on the side. "Well?" she said, and he nodded. He used the diving board to enter, executed a conceited dive and came up gleaming, grinning, as relaxed and easy in the water as a Shanghai boatman.

SHANGHAI. What city could be farther from the pristine and clear, the enviably sparkling coast of southern France than dirty, seething Shanghai, her filthy waterways? The other side of the world, and yet as immediate and implacable as the underside of consciousness: flowing, undammed. Undammable. May carried it with her, the fetid Whangpoo hung with haze, busy with ferries and junks, the occasional body of a dead addict or whore bobbing between hulls. Barges sinking low under the weight of coal and cabbages, steamers along the jetties exchanging cases of biscuits for crates of tea, wines for silks. Mail boats disgorging their sacks of correspondence and journals, wedding banns, death notices, the occasional love letter smothered among missionary reports and month-old European newspapers.

TAKE A DEEP BREATH. Keep your mouth closed."

May hesitated, and he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her slowly down, under the water's surface. She watched silver streams of bubbles escape her nose, then came quickly up with her eyes burning, grabbed for the side, his shoulder, anything to keep from sinking. Drowning.

"Not bad," he said. And again, after she'd stopped gasping, he pushed her gently under. They did this for an hour.

"You have to be comfortable with your head underwater," he said. "Holding your breath."

Not once did he mention her feet-not on the first day, not subsequently-and the fact that he didn't earn him her respect.

If she came downstairs late for her lesson, she found him doing chin-ups on the end of the diving board, easily pulling his torso up out of the deep end. Through the trees, the sun scattered the surface of the pool with bright shards. Over and over, he lifted himself out, disturbing the water just enough to make them dance.

After breathing came kicking. He brought a life preserver and told her to hold it and kick hard enough to travel the length of the pool and back. She made slow progress and stayed close to the side. Three times she stopped to catch her breath. He swam next to her, propelling his big body as if it were weightless, turning from stomach to side to back. A gap separated his front teeth; through it he sent up silver arcs of water when he did the backstroke.

"If you don' t get so you don' t need to rest, you won't make any progress." He made the comment noncommittally, as if he didn't care much, either way. His eyelashes, bleached white by the sun, clumped together into wet, starry points, and his tanned face conveyed the benign condescension of an animal trainer. She liked it, his detachment; she preferred it. Her successes, her failures: these were not his but hers. They belonged to her.

IN THE NEXT WORLD, May had been warned, she would find a lake under whose surface swam those women who had borne children. The lake was a lake of blood. Blood lost each month and lost in childbirth. The blood of stained cloths washed in the rivers.

To ease the sufferings of the dead, the temple bell, as wide and as clamorous as that in the firehouse, was lined with their hair, a few strands taken from each and stuck to the cold metal with a dab of wax or a smear of rice syrup. With every strike of its clapper, one swimmer could come up for a gasp of air. or so May's mother explained, many years before-a lifetime ago-when Chu'en took her past the joss house and May asked why it was that tangled drifts of dark, shining hair blew through its dusty forecourt.

May and her mother had stared past the sedan chair's curtains. "I'm never going there," May said, shaking her head. "Not to that lake." Her mother didn't answer. Instead, "Hurry! Hurry!" she called out to the boys carrying the chair. They were late returning home; May's grandmother would be angry.

ARMS WERE HARDER than legs. She tried holding the life preserver with one arm while stroking with the other, but in the end he had to support her while she practiced. He stood in the shallow end and held her up on the surface of the water with his broad palms. The feel of his hands against her ribs, his frown of youthful concentration, their formal yet physical intimacy-these reminded her of a time when she was as young as he, and working as a prostitute in Shanghai.

"No. No. Your timing is off. You turn your face up out of the water when you lift your arm. You take a breath as you lift."

WHEN SHE WAS HOME, Alice watched the lessons from the balcony outside her bedroom, her vigil silhouetted by the white curtain behind her.

May didn't do things casually. She wouldn't pursue swimming for the pleasure of it. Certainly not for the exercise, never on the advice of a physician. She must have some sort of a ... a plan?

Crawl, back, breast, side: Alice tracked May's progress through the strokes, her own arms folded, her dark head dipped apprehensively. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.APPRENTICESHIP

The gatepost, stuccoed pink to match the villa, bore a glazed tile painted with a blue number, the same as that in the advertisement. Please inquire in person. Avenue des Fleurs, 72.

A hot day, and so bright. Sun flared off windowpanes and wrung sparks from freshly watered shrubs. One after another, applicants paused at the locked gate, considered its wrought-iron flourishes and the distinctly self-satisfied hue of the residence glimpsed through its bars. They checked the number twice, as if lost, hesitated before pushing the black button in its burnished ring of brass.

When the houseboy appeared with a ring of keys, his severely combed hair shining with petroleum jelly, they ducked in response to his bow and followed him through the silently swinging gate with their heads still lowered, squinting dizzily at the glittering crushed white quartz that lined the rose beds along the path.

"Won't you sit down?"

May received them in the sunroom. Behind her chair, glass doors offered a view of terraced back gardens, an avalanche of extravagantly bright blooms, a long, blue-tiled swimming pool that splattered its reflection over the white walls and ceiling.

Of the eleven men and women who answered her notice, four did not resist staring at May outright, and she dismissed them immediately.

Whatever the name Mrs. Arthur Cohen might suggest to someone answering an ad, May would not have been it. To begin with, wasn't Cohen a Jewish name? And there she was, unmistakably Chinese. Now who in 1927 had encountered such an intermarriage, even among the Riviera's population of gamblers and gigolos, its yachtsmen and consumptives and inexhaustible reserves of deposed, transient countesses living off pawned tiaras? In the summer months, when sun worshippers overtook the city of Nice-women walking bare-legged on the boulevards, and bare-lipped, too, tennis skirts no lower than the knee and not a smudge of lipstick, their hair bobbed, their necks brown and muscular, canine-May Cohen looked not so much out of style as otherworldly.

Despite the heat, she received her eleven candidates in traditional dress: a mandarin coat of pink silk embroidered with a pattern of cranes and fastened with red frogs, matching pink trousers, and tiny silk shoes that stuck out from under their hems like two pointed red tongues.

Her abundant and absolutely black hair was coiled in a chignon. Pulled back, it accentuated a pretty widow's peak, a forehead as pale and smooth as paper. Her eyes were black and long, each brow a calligraphic slash; her full lips were painted red. She had a narrow nose with nervous, delicate nostrils, imperious, excitable nostrils that seemed to have been formed with almost fanatical attention. But each part of May-her cuticles and wristbones and earlobes, the blue-white luminous hollow between her clavicles-inspired the same conclusion: that to assemble her had required more than the usual workaday genius of biology. At fifty, her beauty was still so extreme as to be an affront to any sensible soul. Her French, like her English, was impeccable.

Of the remaining seven applicants (those who did not disqualify themselves by staring), the first offered references from a local sanitarium. Perhaps this explained his solicitousness, his tender careful moist gaze, as if she were moribund. "Please accept my apologies," she said. "You won't do."

The second was, she decided, an idiot. "You have had-it was an accident? " he asked, and she smiled, but not kindly.

The third, a narrow, ascetic Swiss with an inexpertly sewn harelip and a carefully mended coat, looked as if she needed employment. But she wrinkled her nose with fastidious disapproval, and May rang for the houseboy to see her out.

The fourth's excitement as he glimpsed the tightly bound arch of May's right foot, his damp hands and posture of unrestrained anticipation: these presaged trouble. May uncrossed her legs, she stood and bid him a good afternoon.

The fifth and sixth changed their minds.

The seventh, who was the last, would have to do. He was taciturn; and that, anyway, she approved.

"When do I start?" was his longest utterance.

"Today," May said. "Now." And the houseboy provided him with bathing costume, towel, and robe, a room in which to change.

May, using her jade cane, slowly climbed the stairs to her suite of rooms, where she took off all her clothes except the white binding cloths and red shoes-for without them she couldn't walk at all-and put on her new black bathing costume. She pulled the pins from her hair, brushed and braided it, and, wearing a white robe so long that it trailed, began her long walk down the stairs. On the way she met Alice, her niece, breathless and ascending two at a time.

"I'm late," Alice explained, unnecessarily. And then, "Please!" as May blocked her way with her cane.

"For what?" May asked. "For whom?"

"I'm meeting him at the Negresco. We're having tea, that's all, so don't let's quarrel." Alice tried to push past, but May held the cane firmly across the banister. "Look, he'll think I'm not coming!"

"Just remember." May pointed the tip of her cane at Alice's heart. "We all die alone."

"Please! I haven't time for this now!" Alice made an exasperated lunge for the cane, which May abruptly lowered so that Alice lost her balance; she ended sitting on the step below her aunt's feet.

May looked down at her. "I'm more fortunate than you."

"And why is that?" The words came out tartly, and Alice scowled, she stuck her chin out belligerently; still, she considered her aunt remarkable for the tragedies she'd survived.

"Because," May said. "Opium is a better drug."

"Well," Alice said, after an amplified sigh. She stood up. "Any advice?" she asked, sarcastic.

May shrugged. She raised her perfectly symmetrical eyebrows and turned up an empty white palm. "Avoid marriage," she said. "Obviously." She continued down the stairs, Alice watching as she navigated the foyer, her white robe trailing over the parquet, her abbreviated steps invisible, disguised. Through the salon and out to the pool: who could guess how she hobbled?

In the garden, on a chaise he'd pulled from the shade of an umbrella into the afternoon sun, the young man was waiting. Sprawled long-legged on its yellow cushion, the robe folded, unused, at its foot, he opened his eyes at the sound of the patio door; he stood as May approached. A low stool had been placed just at the very lip of tile that overhung the stairs descending to the shallow end of the long blue pool, and May sat on it. The young man watched in silence as she untied the sash of her robe and pulled her white arms from its white sleeves, let it fall back from her shoulders before bending to unbind her feet.

Because she was so graceful in all her movements, the clumsiness with which she entered the pool surprised him. Still, the young man said nothing, he made no move to help May as she used her arms to maneuver herself from the low seat to the edge of the pool and from there onto the steps.

For a moment she rested on the highest one, submerged only as far as her waist and looking into the water. Under the pool's refracting surface her feet appeared no more foreshortened than any other woman's.




She turned to him, her hand on the side. "Well?" she said, and he nodded. He used the diving board to enter, executed a conceited dive and came up gleaming, grinning, as relaxed and easy in the water as a Shanghai boatman.

SHANGHAI. What city could be farther from the pristine and clear, the enviably sparkling coast of southern France than dirty, seething Shanghai, her filthy waterways? The other side of the world, and yet as immediate and implacable as the underside of consciousness: flowing, undammed. Undammable. May carried it with her, the fetid Whangpoo hung with haze, busy with ferries and junks, the occasional body of a dead addict or whore bobbing between hulls. Barges sinking low under the weight of coal and cabbages, steamers along the jetties exchanging cases of biscuits for crates of tea, wines for silks. Mail boats disgorging their sacks of correspondence and journals, wedding banns, death notices, the occasional love letter smothered among missionary reports and month-old European newspapers.

TAKE A DEEP BREATH. Keep your mouth closed."

May hesitated, and he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her slowly down, under the water's surface. She watched silver streams of bubbles escape her nose, then came quickly up with her eyes burning, grabbed for the side, his shoulder, anything to keep from sinking. Drowning.

"Not bad," he said. And again, after she'd stopped gasping, he pushed her gently under. They did this for an hour.

"You have to be comfortable with your head underwater," he said. "Holding your breath."

Not once did he mention her feet-not on the first day, not subsequently-and the fact that he didn't earn him her respect.

If she came downstairs late for her lesson, she found him doing chin-ups on the end of the diving board, easily pulling his torso up out of the deep end. Through the trees, the sun scattered the surface of the pool with bright shards. Over and over, he lifted himself out, disturbing the water just enough to make them dance.

After breathing came kicking. He brought a life preserver and told her to hold it and kick hard enough to travel the length of the pool and back. She made slow progress and stayed close to the side. Three times she stopped to catch her breath. He swam next to her, propelling his big body as if it were weightless, turning from stomach to side to back. A gap separated his front teeth; through it he sent up silver arcs of water when he did the backstroke.

"If you don' t get so you don' t need to rest, you won't make any progress." He made the comment noncommittally, as if he didn't care much, either way. His eyelashes, bleached white by the sun, clumped together into wet, starry points, and his tanned face conveyed the benign condescension of an animal trainer. She liked it, his detachment; she preferred it. Her successes, her failures: these were not his but hers. They belonged to her.

IN THE NEXT WORLD, May had been warned, she would find a lake under whose surface swam those women who had borne children. The lake was a lake of blood. Blood lost each month and lost in childbirth. The blood of stained cloths washed in the rivers.

To ease the sufferings of the dead, the temple bell, as wide and as clamorous as that in the firehouse, was lined with their hair, a few strands taken from each and stuck to the cold metal with a dab of wax or a smear of rice syrup. With every strike of its clapper, one swimmer could come up for a gasp of air. or so May's mother explained, many years before-a lifetime ago-when Chu'en took her past the joss house and May asked why it was that tangled drifts of dark, shining hair blew through its dusty forecourt.

May and her mother had stared past the sedan chair's curtains. "I'm never going there," May said, shaking her head. "Not to that lake." Her mother didn't answer. Instead, "Hurry! Hurry!" she called out to the boys carrying the chair. They were late returning home; May's grandmother would be angry.

ARMS WERE HARDER than legs. She tried holding the life preserver with one arm while stroking with the other, but in the end he had to support her while she practiced. He stood in the shallow end and held her up on the surface of the water with his broad palms. The feel of his hands against her ribs, his frown of youthful concentration, their formal yet physical intimacy-these reminded her of a time when she was as young as he, and working as a prostitute in Shanghai.

"No. No. Your timing is off. You turn your face up out of the water when you lift your arm. You take a breath as you lift."

WHEN SHE WAS HOME, Alice watched the lessons from the balcony outside her bedroom, her vigil silhouetted by the white curtain behind her.

May didn't do things casually. She wouldn't pursue swimming for the pleasure of it. Certainly not for the exercise, never on the advice of a physician. She must have some sort of a ... a plan?

Crawl, back, breast, side: Alice tracked May's progress through the strokes, her own arms folded, her dark head dipped apprehensively. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
编辑推荐 One of the women in Kathryn Harrison's The Binding Chair has a mind "which had always suffered from morbid imaginings." Harrison could be telling a gentle joke on herself here, for she has stuffed her novel with such imaginings. Here are broken fingers, abortions, Marathon Man-style dentistry, sodomy (not in a good way), and even an abused chicken. One particular morbidity, though, is the spur of the tale.

May, a young Chinese woman, suffers the brutal ritual of foot binding at the turn of the last century. The book follows May from a bad marriage (think Raise the Red Lantern) to Shanghai, "the infamous city of danger and opportunity." May--either despite or because of her foot's deformity--is considered a woman of astonishing beauty. "Each part of May, her cuticles and wristbones and earlobes, the blue-white luminous hollow between her clavicles, inspired the same conclusion: that to assemble her had required more than the usual workaday genius of biology." Her beauty, her fetishistically bound feet, and her quick mastery of a handful of languages earn her a pile of money and finally a Western husband.

May develops a close relationship with her husband's Jewish family, especially with her unruly niece Alice. Harrison's scrupulously researched novel follows the two of them from Shanghai to London and back again, encountering along the way a colorful cast of women who've all suffered a disfigurement, mental or physical, that echoes May's. Finally several of the women come together in Nice, where each works out her destiny. The Binding Chair is far-flung, geographically and emotionally, and never quite coalesces, but perhaps the author was intentionally seeking to make a story about the Chinese and the Jews that has a feeling of diaspora. You've got to hand it to Harrison. Most writers, upon developing a fascination with Shanghai, would write a nice article for Travel & Leisure and have done with it. Kathryn Harrison has forged an ambitious novel. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

专业书评

From Publishers Weekly As she demonstrated in Poison, Harrison renders historical settings with textured fidelity. Here she spins an exotic and irresistible tale set mainly in Shanghai at the turn of the last century, with evocative side trips through Russia, England and the French Riviera. The changing culture of China is reflected in the life of a compelling character. Born in 1884, May must submit to foot binding as a child, and thereafter endures constant pain and the constriction of her freedom. Despite her deformed feet, at 14 she escapes a sadistic husband and pursues a new life in a brothel in Shanghai, where she eventually marries a kindhearted Jewish immigrant from Australia who's a member of the Foot Emancipation Society. May's stubborn, indomitable spirit isn't hampered by her husband's inability to find a job, since they live in the opulent household of his sister and her husband, and their two daughters--the younger of whom comes under May's thrall. Manipulative and autocratic, May spends her life despising her useless feet, fighting convention and adoring her high-spirited niece. But she cannot escape the ancient legends and superstitions that shadow her life, or the opium habit she develops after several emotional blows. Lost children are one theme here, and the varied ways people deal with such loss. Another is the lot of women striving to be independent in a hostile world. Harrison describes in harrowing detail the barbaric foot-binding ritual, various forms of sexual brutality, parental abuse and official torture. She is equally deft at social comedy, erotic titillation and tender sentiment. This is her best work to date, an intricately and elegantly constructed narrative about intersections of character and fate, history and chance, and the ironic, tragic fulfillment of hearts' desires. 12-city author tour. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal A turn-of-the-century tale of a Chinese girl who flees from foot binding to brothel to marriage with a Westerner.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist Harrison is known best for her galvanizing memoir of incest, The Kiss (1997), but she is also a novelist of sure powers with a taste for the erotic, the taboo, and the macabre. Her latest novel spans the life of a beautiful, upper-class Chinese woman who is subjected to the ancient and brutal tradition of footbinding in the waning years of the nineteenth century. May's entire crippled youth is dedicated to preparing for marriage, but when her husband turns out to be a sadist, she runs away to Shanghai and enters a brothel. She not only becomes sexually adept, she also teaches herself English and French, hoping to be rescued by a smitten foreigner. Her knight does appear, albeit in the unlikely form of Arthur Cohen, a red-haired, softhearted Jewish idealist, who lives with his high-strung sister, Dolly, her wealthy and generous husband, and their two daughters, Alice and Cecily. Arthur is involved in a campaign against footbinding, but rather than being repulsed by May's misshapen feet, her painful claws of flesh, he is enthralled and ends up marrying her. Glamorous May joins the Cohen household and finds a kindred spirit in Alice, a renegade destined for trouble. Dolly attempts to minimize what she perceives as May's corrupting influence by sending the girls to a British boarding school, a plot twist that enables Harrison to set some of the novel's most intriguing scenes aboard the then brand-new Trans-Siberian Express and add melancholy Russians to her vibrant and enticing cast. Her plot--sinuous, surprising, and rife with crises both ironic and tragic--is compelling, too, although she fails to fully address the questions of fate raised by May's suffering. Even so, Harrison is inventive, provocative, and entertaining. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews An engrossing tale contrasting the lives of a young Caucasian and her Chinese stepaunt. Harrison is a powerful, hypnotic writer fascinated by the psychosexual elements of a secretive human life. Her latest effort is skilled in incorporating themes from her earlier fictionand from her life as well, it would seem, as revealed in The Kiss (1997), the memoir of her consensual sexual relationship with her father. Like Poison (1995), this novel is set in a historical period (the first half of the 20th century) and an exotic locale (Shanghai), and, like all of Harrisons books (Exposure, 1993, etc.), it examines how women get and use sexual and social power. The first of the two contrasting but intertwined stories focuses on May, a Chinese-born woman whose traditional foot-binding ceremony is recalled in vivid and horrifying detail. The second follows Mays step-niece, Alice, through adolescent sexual awakening. While both are strong, forceful womenwho clash accordinglyMays life makes for the more compelling drama. Addicted to opium for years, and hobbled by the foot-binding, she is a fierce character who never becomes a clichd dragon lady. Particularly gripping are the portrayals of her abusive first marriage and of her convention-defying second try with Alices uncle Arthur. Harrison deals subtly with the themes of racism and anti-Semitism (Arthurs and Alices families are Jewish) even when constructing so obvious a set-piece as the scene in which May is arrested at Londons Fortnum & Mason for using slaves to carry her around. In a book distinguished by atmospheric backdrops and panoramic scope, two additional pleasures stand out: an abundance of full-bodied minor characters, and a sharply telling portrait of expatriate Westerners getting rich in the East. A deft weaving together of sexuality and the macabre into a rich fictional tapestry.-- Copyright ? 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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The gatepost, stuccoed pink to match the villa, bore a glazed tile painted with a blue number, the same as that in the advertisement. Please inquire in person. Avenue des Fleurs, 72.

A hot day, and so bright. Sun flared off windowpanes and wrung sparks from freshly watered shrubs. One after another, applicants paused at the locked gate, considered its wrought-iron flourishes and the distinctly self-satisfied hue of the residence glimpsed through its bars. They checked the number twice, as if lost, hesitated before pushing the black button in its burnished ring of brass.

When the houseboy appeared with a ring of keys, his severely combed hair shining with petroleum jelly, they ducked in response to his bow and followed him through the silently swinging gate with their heads still lowered, squinting dizzily at the glittering crushed white quartz that lined the rose beds along the path.

"Won't you sit down?"

May received them in the sunroom. Behind her chair, glass doors offered a view of terraced back gardens, an avalanche of extravagantly bright blooms, a long, blue-tiled swimming pool that splattered its reflection over the white walls and ceiling.

Of the eleven men and women who answered her notice, four did not resist staring at May outright, and she dismissed them immediately.

Whatever the name Mrs. Arthur Cohen might suggest to someone answering an ad, May would not have been it. To begin with, wasn't Cohen a Jewish name? And there she was, unmistakably Chinese. Now who in 1927 had encountered such an intermarriage, even among the Riviera's population of gamblers and gigolos, its yachtsmen and consumptives and inexhaustible reserves of deposed, transient countesses living off pawned tiaras? In the summer months, when sun worshippers overtook the city of Nice-women walking bare-legged on the boulevards, and bare-lipped, too, tennis skirts no lower than the knee and not a smudge of lipsti
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