eShop USA > Books > The Binding Chair: or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society
The Binding Chair: or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society
List Price: $13.00Our Price: $10.40 You Save: $2.60 (20%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780060934422
ISBN: 0060934425
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: July 01, 2001
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: June 26, 2001
Studio: Harper Perennial
Related Items: Featured Listmania!
Editorial Review:
One of the women in Kathryn Harrison's The Binding Chair has a mind "which had always suffered from morbid imaginings." Harrison could be telling a gentle joke on herself here, for she has stuffed her novel with such imaginings. Here are broken fingers, abortions, Marathon Man-style dentistry, sodomy (not in a good way), and even an abused chicken. One particular morbidity, though, is the spur of the tale.
May, a young Chinese woman, suffers the brutal ritual of foot binding at the turn of the last century. The book follows May from a bad marriage (think Raise the Red Lantern) to Shanghai, "the infamous city of danger and opportunity." May--either despite or because of her foot's deformity--is considered a woman of astonishing beauty. "Each part of May, her cuticles and wristbones and earlobes, the blue-white luminous hollow between her clavicles, inspired the same conclusion: that to assemble her had required more than the usual workaday genius of biology." Her beauty, her fetishistically bound feet, and her quick mastery of a handful of languages earn her a pile of money and finally a Western husband.
May develops a close relationship with her husband's Jewish family, especially with her unruly niece Alice. Harrison's scrupulously researched novel follows the two of them from Shanghai to London and back again, encountering along the way a colorful cast of women who've all suffered a disfigurement, mental or physical, that echoes May's. Finally several of the women come together in Nice, where each works out her destiny. The Binding Chair is far-flung, geographically and emotionally, and never quite coalesces, but perhaps the author was intentionally seeking to make a story about the Chinese and the Jews that has a feeling of diaspora. You've got to hand it to Harrison. Most writers, upon developing a fascination with Shanghai, would write a nice article for Travel & Leisure and have done with it. Kathryn Harrison has forged an ambitious novel. --Claire Dederer
In poised and elegant prose, Kathryn Harrison weaves a stunning story of women, travel, and flight; of love, revenge, and fear; of the search for home and the need to escape it. Set in alluring Shanghai at the turn of the century, The Binding Chair intertwines the destinies of a Chinese woman determined to forget her past and a Western girl focused on the promises of the future.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Had potential but ultimately disappoints
Without repeating the plot details that other reviewers have already discussed, I think the book is a great disppointment. It has fragments of a captivating and compelling plot (the story of the main character's story, footbinding, Chinese culture in the early days, and the intersection of Chinese and English/Jewish culture) but none of those interesting elements were given enough attention by the author. The end result is a story where none of the characters were fleshed out sufficiently, and ... Read More
Rating:  - Needed a good editor
As the others have written in their reviews, I found the book trying to do too many things and failing to tightly weave all together. Characters come and go, even entering comparatively late in the story, but aren't fully developed. Even May,the protagonist, becomes a confusing mass of artificiality and repressed motives.
However, if you read the novel more as a travelogue it succeeds because of its many sharply drawn vignettes (such as traveling on a train through Russia, living in infected ... Read More
Rating:  - Um... well....
I picked up the Binding Chair after reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. I was hoping to read another excellent story about China and its customs. What I got with the Binding Chair was a 2nd rate book that couldn't seem to find it groove, let alone stay on track with the story. A disappointing read, I struggled to finish the book... read any of the books by Lisa See instead.
Rating:  - The binding chair
A very fascinating story..shocking in some parts...gives an in depth sensation of being in another place and time
Rating: - Slightly better than reading a ceral box
Well, once again I pick up a book with great hope & end up disappointed. Like other reviewers I found the constantly changing narrative difficult to follow and extremely distracting. By the end of the book I hated it. I thought the ending of the book was terrible!!!
Once more I am left convinced that I have already read all the really good books.
Related Categories:
|
