- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Picador (26 Jan 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330480308
- ISBN-13: 978-0330480307
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 13.7 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,713,652 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Journalist Sid Smith's debut novel is a brave excursion into little-known and alien territory. Armed with stocks of historical, political and medical information, he has somehow made the imaginative leap into a realm few understand: the sealed-off world of China during the Cultural Revolution.
James Stuart Fraser, a private in the British Army, deserts and ends up spending 35 years "among the unshiftable Chinese". Many of those years are spent in the wretched poverty of a village of the despised Miao people, where life revolves around the solitary buffalo. The incredible tedium of Fraser's rural subsistence (existence is too strong a term) is evoked in a taut prose, filled with enthralling and convincing detail.
However, as time passes Fraser grows aware of the pseudo-academic work going on at the clinic, where eugenicists wreak havoc with village life in their search for the scientific "truth" of race. As years suddenly pass in a paragraph, the pace races unannounced to thriller speed and the carefully wrought momentum Smith had achieved is lost. Notwithstanding, Smith has an important story to tell, and at its best, Something Like A House is very good indeed. --Alan Stewart
Charlie Hill, The Independent on Sunday - 21.1.01
"Smith is a mercurial stylist, his prose by turns confounding and comforting, earth-bound and star-gazing... Phrase-making of breathtaking beauty jostles with stunted English, poetic finesse with language of purely functional use. And all the time you are spell-bound, mesmerised by a disturbing arrhythmia, the most enduringly unsettling aspect of this haunting and original novel."
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I have lived in China and also studied Chinese history, and the Cultural Revolution has always fascinated me, so when I saw this book while I was on holiday in the UK I bought it immediately. I so much wanted to like this book, and so I am a little disappointed to only be able to give it 3 stars, but I really can't give it any more.
The first few pages promise so much ("Hello. Call me Jim. I have seen amazing things.") And I thought, fantastic, this will be such an original read, and insightful, too. But what amazing things has he seen? The cannibalism described in the book, one of the dark secrets of the Cultural Revolution, seems to be viewed through a veil. It just happens, and the characters move on. Likewise with Madame Fei's memories of medical experiments and torture by the Japanese, Sid Smith describes such terrible things, and I felt I was watching something small on a screen. This is what surprised and disappointed me: that this novel could have explored the 'why' of so much that happened, but it didn't. After 35 years in China, Fraser seems the same as when he first arrived, and that left me not caring much what happened to him. But perhaps this is the insight I should take from this book; that despite the horror of so much of the last 50 years in China, people continue to live side by side, leaving so much unsaid.
If you have never been to China this book may be more interesting, but if you are only going to read one book about a foreigner's experience in China, read "Lost In Translation" by Nicole Mones instead. It had more insights into the impact of the Cultural Revolution on people's lives, and is written in a way that will pull you into the side streets of Beijing and the dusty expanses of China's North-West, and you will understand why a foreigner would want to become Chinese.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book got wonderful reviews in the press and you can see why. You're gripped like a vice from page one, and (along with the enthralling adventure of a Westerner surviving in the backwoods of China) there are amazing true-life revelations about everything from how to get a rope through a buffalo's nostrils to how it will soon be possible to kill every Chinese person on the planet. I've also never seen such a great description of Buddhist Enlightenment, when you feel how "the air puts its mouth around every pebble" and how "every pleasure equals its rarity". There isn't a word wasted and some readers may not be up to it -- but this book is something like a masterpiece.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I enjoyed this book. In fact, I recommended this book to other people. The prose is enjoyable, the topic interesting, and the subject engaging. However, it was a bit shallow on all of the topics that it might have dealt with concerning the policies of the Chinese government towards native peoples and the experience of a foreigner abroad. It was strange that one never really got the feeling of regret or concern from the main character on leaving his home life.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Brilliant and absorbing.
A terrific book which (like 'White Teeth') won the double - the Whitbread First Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A modern classic.
Published on 16 Sep 2003
How did this book get such rave reviews?
Smith has an engaging prose style, but I really can't see what all the fuss is about with this novel. Read more
Published on 21 Feb 2002
That rarest of books: one with an original plot
This in extraordinary debut novel and one which contains that rarest of beasts: an original plot in a setting about which most people will be blissfully ignorant -- the peasant... Read more
Published on 10 Jan 2001
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