Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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Da Chen's Brothers sprawls over nearly four decades, two countries and 421 pages.
But, as the novel's title indicates, it's also an intimate portrait of a family, albeit a very fractured one.
In 1960, just before China's Cultural Revolution, Tan and Shento are fathered by a prominent general under vastly different circumstances. Clever Tan is reared in Beijing in privilege, while the equally shrewd Shento, the son of the general's mistress, is raised in the mountainous southwest in poverty.
With Tan and Shento unaware of each other's existence, their parallel yet paradoxical lives are drawn out in chapters alternately written by each brother until the appearance of the other person who binds them, their mutual love, Sumi. Sumi, an orphan turned radical writer, proves to be the catalyst for the story's shift to Cain and Abel allegory, as the increasingly powerful Shento and Tan fight each other for Sumi's affection and personal glory.
Chen's own father was separated from his brother for 35 years, courtesy of communism and, Chen's father believed, fate. The paths taken by Tan and Shento, too, are carved by destiny.
But sometimes fate's hand, as depicted through Chen's pen, requires a willing suspension of disbelief. After Shento survives his mother's suicide (she hurls herself off a cliff as she's giving birth, the umbilical cord snaps, and he lives, cradled by tree branches), he endures a village attack and an attempted execution.
Brothers takes another turn for the telenovela when the one time Shento and Sumi consummate their love, she, conveniently enough, gets pregnant; their son later plays a prominent role in the Shento-Tan struggle. The prose, too, veers toward melodrama, the chapters reading like the diary entries of a teenage love triangle, studded with a surfeit of exclamation points and weepy, "Can-I-ever-love-again?" rhetorical questions.
Otherwise, the novel skims along as Chen covers the full terrain of China, geographically, culturally and politically. By turns sanguine and sobering, Brothers is best, perhaps, as a richly wrought examination of a faraway country during a turbulent time.
Brothers
By Da Chen
Shaye Areheart Books, 421 pp., $25
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