{"id":756,"date":"2013-09-06T09:45:26","date_gmt":"2013-09-06T17:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=756"},"modified":"2017-12-18T13:27:35","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T21:27:35","slug":"review-five-star-billionaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/06\/review-five-star-billionaire\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Five Star Billionaire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/16071831\" style=\"float: left;padding-right: 20px\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net\/books\/1364179694m\/16071831.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Five Star Billionaire\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n      <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/16071831\">Five Star Billionaire<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/140377\">Tash Aw<\/a><br \/>\n      My rating: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/713151007\">3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n<p>      Four people dealing with Shanghai\u2014the book jacket will tell you five, but one of them <i>is<\/i> Shanghai, for all intents and purposes. He\u2019s the ostensible narrator, in his own sections, the giver of unsolicited, but not unwanted advice. His platitudes are chapter titles, and they amount to a reluctant resistance to existential angst.<\/p>\n<p>The other four are narrated in third person, intimacy held at arm\u2019s length. We Westerners will call them inscrutable, that word laced with a little less racism than the erstwhile \u201cOriental.\u201d But this is the Occident in the East, now, this new Shanghai, same as they old Shanghai, to steal a line from that currently-revered band from the 70s. Or 60s. Or whatever\u2014it was before my time.<\/p>\n<p>This Shanghai is all too familiar to those of us, readers, who\u2019ve experienced The Character of A City through books. This new China is New York, is New Angeles, is New \u2018Cago. (Sorry, I\u2019m trying to be inventive. I\u2019m not doing a good job. I\u2019m a foreigner her myself). Themes of aliens but not alienation run through Aw\u2019s novel, copy cats without simulacrum, fate without destiny.<\/p>\n<p>I liked the minor interweaving of the character\u2019s lives in the novel, liked the small shifts in style Aw achieved between chapters. It got a bit tedious towards the end, despite the all-to-predictable \u201csurprise\u201d (not enough of a pay-off to justify the tedium, but then I don\u2019t think that the surprise was intended to be any kind of pay-off or climax; see above, re: fate without destiny). There were a few places, maybe, where a character\u2019s own character shift was a bit sudden\u2026 but I didn\u2019t mind that so much.<\/p>\n<p>Read this because it\u2019s on the Booker prize long-list for 2013. I don\u2019t think it will make the short list, (read this review post-October and see if I\u2019m right) but I\u2019m still glad I read it.<\/p>\n<p>      <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/713151007\">View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw My rating: 3 of 5 stars Four people dealing with Shanghai\u2014the book jacket will tell you five, but one of them is Shanghai, for all intents and purposes. He\u2019s the ostensible narrator, in his own sections, the giver of unsolicited, but not unwanted advice. His platitudes are chapter titles, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/06\/review-five-star-billionaire\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Review: Five Star Billionaire&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-cc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":757,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions\/757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}