- year first released: 1997
- ISBN of the version I read: 0679781587
- publisher of the version I read: Vintage Contemporaries
- my rating (out of 5): 4.5
Though this isn’t a review of the movie Memoirs of a Geisha, I’d like to start
by highlighting one comparison between the book and its film counterpart:
The movie is breathtakingly beautiful.
Its gorgeous set pieces and majestic use of color paint an incredibly vivid
picture of Kyoto in the 30’s and 40’s.
Novels, of course, are just black words
on white/cream paper (unless they’re illustrated, which this book is not).
And yet Memoirs of a Geisha the book was no less majestic and colorful than
its movie counterpart. It’s rare to find a book that is so
vivid in its descriptions without making you want to shoot yourself in the foot
while reading it.
This might sound like an odd phrase.
What I mean is: when you read a book by Joseph Conrad, you can definitely
picture the scenes very well. But Conrad didn’t seem to have enough faith in his
descriptions, and so he just…kept going. He wanted to make absolutely sure you could picture his scenes exactly right. And so he described them. And described them. And…
Arthur Golden has no such lack in his
confidence as a writer. All throughout Memoirs,
he gives you precisely the right amount of description to get your imagination
in place, and then deftly moves into…well, everything else that goes into
the book.
The plot—the details of which I won’t go
into here—moves at a highly empathetic pace. Our heroine, Sayuri, is entirely credible
as a person, and we never fail to understand her motives. Whether they’re good
or bad, Golden has drawn us into Sayuri’s mind strongly enough that we never
question her choices or behaviors.
This point, too, leads me to perhaps the
most pleasantly surprising element of Memoirs:
I admit that this may be because I’m a
man and wouldn’t actually know any better, but Memoirs boasts the most believable female 1st-person voice
I’ve encountered in fiction – at least in a very long time, if not ever. If
this had been marketed as the actual memoir of a geisha, I would have accepted
it.
Golden gets us to believe that he knows
precisely what he’s talking about and describing regarding the Geisha life of
the 30’s and 40’s. Of course, whether or not his interpretations are in any way
accurate are another matter entirely – one which I certainly can’t comment on,
as I have no personal experience in the matter – but they are distinctly realistic
and credible.
Memoirs
of a Geisha is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Its minor
stumbles – such as a plot which relies just a hair too much on coincidence, and
the final chapter which felt more like an unnecessary epilogue than an actual tying-up of the final pieces of the story – do little to take away from the beautiful
world and words that Golden has deftly created. Considering how brilliantly Memoirs is written, one wonders why
Golden hasn’t put out another book in 20 years now.
I wonder if I would like the main character, since she's so well written. I usually do not like females in stories.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could say for sure. There have been a couple times when I've liked female characters because I felt they were well-written, only to be told by a woman that...well, they weren't that well-written. Either way, it's a great book! ;)
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