Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China [Hardcover]

 

 

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I read Pearl Buck's 'The Good Earth' twice over 40yrs ago, so fascinated was I by her knowledge of her adopted country and her own indomitable character. Hilary Spurling's 'Burying the Bones' is an amazing account of Buck's life in China, her uneasy relationship with her father Absolam and Lossing her husband. Most of all, it gives an insightful look into the character of Pearl Buck as well as the bloody history of China at that time.

Spurling has brought both author and country to life in this fascinating book. Sadly, China & its ruthless tyranny of its own people and distrust of 'farangs' seems little improved in the years in between. I urge anyone interested in China and its long & bloody history to read this remarkable book.

Hilary Spurling sold out her talk at the Bookworm in Beijing last night; I was there. She came across as self-possessed and erudite, with a flawless recall of Buck's life, and a likeable opening anecdote about the picture book she (Spurling) had had as a child (with its vivid colours and happy children playing; not one of Buck's) that would fasten itself into her memory and spark off a life-long interest in China.

Fitting then, that this respected biographer, best known for her Whitbread Prize winning take on Henri Matisse, should chose to unearth one of the 20th century's buried writers, Pearl S. Buck. Timely too, that her subject is the same woman who predicted in 1925 that China would become "the inevitable future leader of Asia" and "exert a tremendous influence upon the future of the world". None though, who knew her, might have doubted otherwise, for Buck it seems was piercingly accurate in her observations, and her ability to arrive at unpopular, or (as in the case of her thoughts on the Southern Presbyterian Church) downright damning conclusions.

Born in the US in 1892 whilst her missionary parents were on a brief sojourn, Buck was taken to China when she was 3 months old. She would grow up bilingual, through one of the most turbulent periods of Chinese history, finally leaving China, forever, in 1934. The bleakness of life in China at that time is rendered shockingly vivid: female infanticide; yearly epidemics of cholera, typhoid, malaria; cycles of famine, flood and drought all played out whilst the Nationalists, Communists and provincial warlords vied bloodily for power. Her father's single-minded vision to convert the (unwilling and uncomprehending) Chinese masses to Christianity would find them outcasts, spat upon, pelted with stones, and worse, as China eventually sought to purge itself of foreigners. One of the biography's most unsettling episodes sees the family, Pearl with her own child by this time, sheltered in the makeshift house of faithful Chinese friends, in what would become known as the "Nanking Incident", whilst their home was looted and several of their foreign friends were murdered.

Spurling's biography traces Pearl from childhood until the publication of The Good Earth - the novel that would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and contributed to her Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. It was a novel that would portray, for the first time in any language (for no Chinese writers had ever done it), the life of China's ordinary people, peasants and farmers, with such frank, warm humanity that it would remain on the bestseller lists for 2 solid years, and never since has it been out of print. In it Buck drew the picture of a beleaguered Chinese people struggling to survive that struck a massive chord particularly in 1930s Depression-era America, and went on, Spurling asserts with conviction, to change the way the whole world perceived China.

A Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner; a tireless campaigner against racism, sexism, and particularly on behalf of children's rights; a prolific speaker, writer, essayist, and editor; a mother to seven children. What is it about Pearl Buck that sees her almost forgotten, unclaimed even by feminism? It seems Buck has never "belonged", at least, not in establishment terms: simultaneously denounced in her own beloved China as an enemy of the people for daring to depict the truth, and in the US for being a communist sympathiser. The church hated her for exposing its proselytizing impotence whilst those it sought to convert lived in poverty and squalor. Even the literary establishment turned up its nose at a writer who, after writing "The Good Earth", would sink (as they saw it) into the mire of factory-line pulp-fiction novelist.

Nothing though, in Pearl Buck's life, seems accidental and least of all her writing. As it had been in China, so would it be in the US and beyond, that Buck was to touch, and be touched by, the common people. Her "mission", Spurling tells us, was to "dispel Western ignorance and prejudice" and she did this "not in spite but because of [her novels'] bland, trite, ingratiating mass-market techniques." The literary establishment may have been mortified, but the public bought her work in their millions. Buck wrote of her readers (for she would receive, and reply to, thousands of their letters over her lifetime): "The finest and most beautiful do not come from these people, but still they are the root and stock of life ... a writer must not lose touch with them.... I feel them. Their minds reach mine, and I try to make mine reach theirs."

Spurling's work is impeccably researched; a biography that conforms to her own theory of the genre's direction towards a "shorter, tighter, more sharply focused form that concentrates on inner meaning rather than its outer chronological and documentary casing." She brings Pearl S. Buck to life, in a highly readable and fascinating way, for a world that might at last be ready to acknowledge her.

Pearl Buck was almost unique for a westerner who could write about early 20th century China with sympathy and understanding. Spurling's book captures this wonderfully and also the appalling character of the American missionary community. Pearl's husband is a representative of one strand of westerner who did something useful without too much sanctimonious snideness. Unhappily he neglected Pearl but probably released her for a much more important mission; to let the outside world know what had happened to one of the world's oldest and most illustrious civilisations and how it was humbled by outsiders, bad governance, misfortune and sheer ungovernable numbers. The book is a marvel; easy to read, well balanced and very important.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book
I'm reading this book at the moment and can't wait to go to bed each night to enjoy more pages. I have a great personal interest in China and have built up quite a library of... Read more

Published 4 months ago by Laughing Chicken

5.0 out of 5 stars exemplary
I remember as a child in the 1950s visiting the public library very regularly and seeing many books by someone called Pearl S. Buck, notably one entitled The Good Earth. Read more

Published 8 months ago by Stephen

4.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written biography of a fascinating woman....
I have been fascinated by the books by Pearl Buck that I have read.....especially The Good Earth which paints such a vivid picture of peasant life in China. Read more

Published 8 months ago by Wynne Kelly

3.0 out of 5 stars Unven bones
I have enjoyed Pearl Buck's books for many years, so welcomed the opportunity to find out more about the woman behind the stories. Read more

Published 8 months ago by S. J. Meredith

5.0 out of 5 stars burying the bones
I bought this as a gift, it was a great prices for a book that was impossible to find on the high street and it was delivered on time!!!

Published 10 months ago by Anna

5.0 out of 5 stars Burying the Bones Hilary Spurling
This is a lively and engaging book. The picture painted of China in the early 20th century is illuminating, often shocking. Read more

Published 12 months ago by Sheila

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book
I thoroughly enjoyed this book about Pearl S Buck. I knew nothing about her or her life and the insight provided by Spurling of Buck's early life in China is extremely... Read more

Published 14 months ago by Beeja Butler

4.0 out of 5 stars Burying the Bones
Remember readin g her books as a teenager and so facinating to read her biography -what a life. I found it a facinating book .

Published 14 months ago by Drumfern

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Book
This is an excellent book, placing Pearl Buck squarely at the centre of the mid 20th Century growth in understanding of China. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Henry Reddaway

3.0 out of 5 stars Burying the Bones:Pearl Buck in China
The book would have benefitted from being edited to about half its length. It was interesting in parts and very informative. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Mrs. Esther Ann Hitchcock

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