boltgroup

Marrying Buddha is better that Wei Hui's first book. I couldn't not read it, Shanghai Baby was so bad, it's like car crash reading-- I couldn't turn away. My main complaint with Marrying Buddha is the lack of copy editor. It's a sequel to the first, as Coco is on book tour for Shanghai Baby. It flips back and forth between her life in New York, and the story of her relationship with a new boyfriend and her life in China as she tries to put her life back together after they've broken up. Wei Hui still thinks she's deep-- "For I have seen almost everything there is to see of human illusion. I have glimpsed what lies beyond the lavender haze. I have witnessed the slow dissolution of life in all its guises and illusions and watched it fade." (p.17) but it's not as bad as her first book. Really, my most serious complaint is lack of copy editor-- in addition to typos and misspellings, there are some fairly serious errors-- every chapter opens with some quotations. In one, she is quoting Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell, but it gets attributed to Candace Bergen instead. Also, her boyfriend, Muju, is referred to as Muji for about half a page. Then on p. 209 she says "That evening when I got home I turned on all the lights in the house, put on a CD by the Latin jazz great Gilberto Bebel called Tanto Teimpo..." now, I know the CD she's referring to, and it's great you should all get it, except it's by Bebel Gilberto and is called Tanto Tempo. Also, I'm not sure I'd call her a Latin jazz great, as she's Brazilian, and I kinda think of Latin music as being in Spanish, not Portuguese, and this is her debut CD and was released in 2000. (But it is a great album.) The other weird thing about Marrying Buddha (to get back on track) is that no where in the book is a translator credited. When I read this, I thought that it might have been written in English, at which case Wei Hui gets a lot of credit for writing a better book, but in a brand new language. However, when I googled it, I did find a site, which states that Larissa Heinrich, of the University of New South Wales, translated it into English. This is the only mention I've been able to find of a translator. I am horrified that Heinrich could go through all that work and not receive any credit whatsoever.

2023-02-05 08:52