The Opposite of Fate

Amazonのエディトリアルレビューより

Book Description

   ベストセラー作家エイミ・タンが初のノンフィクション作品で、「運命」に対する自らの思いを語る。

   エイミ・タンは運命を信じる一家に生まれ育った。『The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings』で彼女は、一家の伝統と現在のアメリカが置かれている状況に思いをめぐらし、彼女自身の運命観を創造しながらも同時に過去を尊重する方法を探っていく。小説を書くこと、家をお守りで飾りたてること、スキーを習うこと、リスたちと暮らすこと、脳の病気を患う3人の家族と折り合っていくこと、天災を乗り越えること、医師とコンサート・ピアニストになってほしいという家族の呪縛と期待を振り払うこと――彼女は日々の出来事や考え方の中に答えを見出していくのだ。

   エイミ・タンの魅力的な小説を特徴づける気迫やユーモア、そして魔力を本書も備えている。タンが与えてくれるのは、今に生きる私たちが直面するこの世の抑鬱と不安を解消するさわやかな解毒剤だ。彼女自身の人生と死後に物事がいかにして起こるかを静かに考えながら、それでも彼女は常にある疑問に立ち戻る。運命と、運命に抗う選択や幸運のお守り、影響や考え方、幸運な偶然について。人はだれでもこうしたものに形作られているものなのだから。

Product Description

Unbearably moving, intensely passionate, deeply personal account of life as seen through the eyes of one of America's best-loved novelists When I began writing this history, I let go of my doubts. I trusted the ghosts of my imagination. They showed me the hundred secret senses. And what I wrote is what I discovered about the endurance of love. So writes Amy Tan at the beginning of this remarkably candid insight into her life. Tan takes us on a journey from her childhood, as a sensitive but intelligent young Chinese American, ashamed of her parents' Chinese ways, to the present day and her position as one of the world's best-loved novelists. She talks of beauty and how she was perceived as a teenager in a country where Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate sex symbol. She describes the daily difficulties of being at once American and Chinese and yet feeling at times like she was truly neither. Most significantly, and heartbreakingly, she tells the history of her family: the grandmother who committed suicide as the only means of defiance open to her against a husband who ignored her wishes; her remarkable mother, whose first husband had her jailed when she tried to leave him; and the shocking deaths of both her father and husband when Amy was just 14. How this weight of history has brought itself to bear on the adult Amy looms large in her own story. Ghosts, chance and fate have played a part in her life, and The Opposite of Fate is an insight into those ancestors, the women who 'never let me forget why these stories need to be told.'

Amazon.com Review

Amy Tan begins The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, a collection of essays that spans her literary career, on a humorous note; she is troubled that her life and novels have become the subject of a "Cliff’s Notes" abridgement. Reading the little yellow booklet, she discovers that her work is seen as complex and rich with symbolism. However, Tan assures her readers that she has no lofty, literary intentions in writing her novels--she writes for herself, and insists that the recurring patterns and themes that critics find in them are entirely their own making. This self-deprecating stance, coupled with Tan’s own clarification of her intentions, makes The Opposite of Fate feel like an extended, private conversation with the author.

Tan manages to find grace and frequent comedy in her sometimes painful life, and she takes great pleasure in being a celebrity. "Midlife Confidential" brings readers on tour with Tan and the rest of the leather-clad writers’ rock band, the Rock-Bottom Remainders. And "Angst and the Second Book" is a brutally honest, frequently hysterical reflection on Tan’s self-conscious attempts to follow the success of The Joy Luck Club.

In a collection so diverse and spanning such a long period of time, inevitably some of the pieces feel dated or repetitious. Yet, Tan comes off as a remarkably humble and sane woman, and the book works well both to fill in her biography and to clarify the boundaries between her life and her fiction. In her final, title essay, Tan juxtaposes her personal struggles against a persistent disease with the nation’s struggles against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. She declares her transformative, artistic power over tragedy, reflecting: "As a storyteller, I know that if I don’t like the ending, I can write a better one." --Patrick O’Kelley