The Buddha in the Attic
In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the women's extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women in their homes; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.
3.7 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
144 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-1905490875 |
| Publisher |
Fig Tree |
| |
In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the women's extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women in their homes; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.
Reviews
The Observer
Elizabeth Day
"Although there are no dominant characters, Otsuka's brilliance is that she is able to make us care about the crowd precisely because we can glimpse individual stories through the delicate layering of collective experience."
08/04/2012
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The Independent
Lucy Scholes
"Some might find the plurality of voice troubling, suggesting that it does little to restore individual identities to those whom history has forgotten, but I would argue the opposite. A host of individual characters and experiences crystallise as families and communities take root."
01/02/2012
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The Daily Mail
Stephanie Cross
"Throughout, Otsuka’s incantatory chorus works to trancelike effect, yet the subtle, infinitely skilful shifts of rhythm, mood and tempo make this an exhilarating, compulsive read. "
26/01/2012
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The New York Times
Alida Becker
"“The Buddha in the Attic is, in a sense, a prelude to Otsuka’s previous book, revealing the often rough acclimatization of a generation of farm laborers and maids, laundry workers and shop clerks whose husbands would take them for granted and whose children would be ashamed of their stilted English and foreign habits. Otsuka’s chorus of narrators allows us to see the variety as well as the similarity of these women’s attempts to negotiate the maze of immigrant life. "
26/08/2011
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The Times
Kate Saunders
"This is more than a history lesson because Otsuka compresses the individual emotions into one haunting story."
21/01/2012
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The Washington Post
Ron Charles
"No story in the conventional sense ever develops, and no individuals emerge for more than a paragraph ... Though they’re often lovely, harrowing or surprising, these lists will have limited appeal to readers pining for more extended narratives and more emotional investment in individual characters. "
16/11/2011
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The Guardian
Ursula K Le Guin
"It is closely and carefully based on factual history/ies. There are novelistically vivid faces, scenes, glimpses, voices, each for a moment only, so you cannot linger anywhere or with anyone. Information is given, a good deal of it, in the most gracefully invisible manner; and history is told. Yet the book has neither a novel's immediacy of individual experience, nor the broad overview of history. The tone is often incantatory, and though the language is direct, unconvoluted, almost without metaphor, its true and very unusual merit lies, I think, in that indefinable quality we call poetry."
27/01/2012
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The Financial Times
Michael Prodger
"A novel way of recounting history and in some places Otsuka manages to seamlessly meld information and a palpable sense of what these lives were like. By telling a mass story Otsuka has debarred herself from the elements that propel fiction. Stirring together snippets of individual experience is like trying to bake a fruit cake using only raisins. This is a sad tale – unremittingly so – but because there is no single figure to stand as an emblem of the communal travails she can’t interest the reader in the addictive vicissitudes of an individual life."
03/02/2012
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