Category Archives: The ladies who say ooooh

2009, over 400 pages but large print.

As I may have mentioned, like nearly every 50 plus, middle class suburban woman, I belong to a book club.  I’m very fond of my Ladies Who Say Ooooh.  That’s my daughter’s name for  the group after listening to us chortling and “oooohing” when the meeting was held at my place once.  We have good discussions.  Although we might go off-topic occasionally, we always answer the questions in the booklet that comes with the book , which yields us a satisfying conversation of  well over an hour.   I always read the book, or re-read it if I’ve read it before and I’ve never once abandoned a book club book. But with this book, I was sure tempted.

We had read A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian previously, and enjoyed it well enough, so I was happy to read this one too.   I couldn’t tell at first if it was a parody of bad writing- it was, after all supposed to be a comedy- but unfortunately, I don’t think that was the case.

I’m not even going to try to describe the plot.  Just a few words, then.   Marriage breakup; sonky teenaged son; batty old lady; the Holocaust; a mystery;  tangled identities; Israel; nefarious real estate agents; old people’s homes; Palestine; apocalypses; cat poo.  Holding all this together is the metaphor of glue, and if you don’t get the metaphor, I’ll tell it to you again because Lewycka sure did.  Glue.

There are just too many threads in this story and the book cries out for a good edit.  It’s touted as “black humour”- are you supposed to laugh at black humour?  Or is it slapstick?- certainly not a genre I’m fond of.  I kept reading, expecting that at some stage it might all come together and that I’d be overwhelmed by how cleverly the author had disguised her intentions behind this implausible, overburdened storyline.  By page 350 I had resigned myself to the likelihood that it just wasn’t going to happen.

When, at the end of the discussion we awarded our notional stars out of five, I gloomily intoned “ONE”.  The others, to be fair, stretched to three, and one Lady even gave it four.  “You don’t HAVE to finish it, you know, Janine” they said.  Ah, but I do!  It’s a book club book!

No, I’m not the last person in the world to read this book.  I read it for a second time, for my Council of Adult Education bookgroup a.k.a “the ladies who say ooooh”, so named by my daughter for our loud ejaculations and bursts of laughter.

So I already knew that it was the story of two young men, the sons of  so-called ‘intellectuals” who were sent to a remote and primitive Chinese village as part of the process of re-education following the Cultural Revolution. After deviously coming into possession of a suitcase of translations of largely 19th century French novels, they decide to share them with the tailor’s daughter, the Little Seamstress, with whom both boys are in love, as their own form of ‘re-education’.

I’m always a little wary of books written by expatriates: not dismissive by any means, but aware that the act of leaving springs from disillusionment and opportunity, and that the narrative may not be untouched by the need to justify the departure.  But this book, although probably somewhat autobiographical given the history of the author, does not dwell on the hardships of their exile.  The poverty and the grinding labour they are put to is not where their real life is.  Instead it is in their resistance and subversion of the situation in which they are placed.

On re-reading it, I appreciated it anew as a bitter-sweet coming-of-age novel, as all good coming-of-age novels are, and as a variation on the Pygmalion story which, like the the original, does not end as the ‘re-educator’ intends it to end.

I haven’t seen the film, but “the ladies” assure me that it is beautifully done.

When this was distributed as the next month’s read for my CAE bookgroup (a.k.a. “The Ladies Who Say Oooooh”) my heart sank.  “I’ve read this”, I thought.  But as I read further into it, I realised that it was not a clone of  Amy Tan 3-female-generation saga, as I expected it to be.  I had not, in fact, read it and now that I’ve finished I wish I hadn’t anyway.

This is a grubby, self-serving, vindictive book.  The author has left her (now deceased) parents’ names unaltered, along with that of her husband.  She did, however, change the names of her siblings.  I think that the issue of changing or not changing names in an autobiography really highlights the sore spots and anxieties in an author’s telling of their story.

The book is one long howl of wounded dignity and pain.  The author’s mother died after giving birth to her, and her father remarried a young, beautiful French-Chinese woman that the family called ‘Niang’, an alternative form of “mother”. The besotted father is putty in her hands, and betrays his allegiances to the children of his first wife- although admittedly, the relationship between a widowed father and the child whose birth precipitated the mother’s death must always be a fraught one.

This is a toxic family.  Niang certainly does appear a cold, manipulating, scheming woman who sows jealousy and dissesion amongst her children and their half-siblings.  They are all- parents and children- dominated by the love of money, ruthless in their determination to get ahead; remorseless in their own quest for parental approval.  The author, as narrator, portrays herself always as the innocent victim of others’ perfidy- a rather self-serving and perhaps not always accurate assessment.  There is no loyalty to family, and certainly no loyalty to country among the immediate family- they collect and discard nationalities at will in their thrust to get ahead.

Why did she write this book?  One can only think that it is her revenge, served cold and in print.  And wait- there’s more!  Not only did she write this book, but she rehashed her revenge  in her second book Chinese Cinderella which from its description, sounds like the same book fictionalized.

I feel complicit in her vindictiveness by even having read this book.