Esmé Weijun Wang. (2016). The Border of Paradise: A Novel. The Unnamed Press.

Esmé Weijun Wang. 2016. The Border of Paradise: A Novel. The Unnamed Press.

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Border of Paradise: A Novel. The Unnamed Press, 2016.

Esmé Weijun Wang. The Border of Paradise: A Novel. The Unnamed Press, 2016.

OverDrive Product Record

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The Border of Paradise

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1. • value: Neurosis
2. • value: Suicide
3. • value: Wealth
4. • value: American family
5. • value: mental illness
6. • value: Intercultural marriage
7. • value: gothic novel
8. • value: heirs
9. • value: literary novel
10. • value: inherited trauma
11. • value: father suicide
12. • value: Neuroses
13. • value: child from an affair
14. • value: multigenerational american family novel
15. • value: neurotic family
16. • value: neurotic protagonist
17. • value: piano company
18. • value: piano company heir
19. • value: affair with friend from childhood
20. • value: border of paradise
21. • value: Brooklyn heir
22. • value: Brooklyn piano fortune
23. • value: Esmé Weijun Wang
24. • value: parental suicide
25. • value: piano fortune heir
26. • value: Polish-American Family story
27. • value: postwar Brooklyn
28. • value: Weijun Wang

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   • bioText:

     Esmé Weijun Wang is an award-winning mental health advocate and speaker, as well as a journalist and essayist. The Border of Paradise is her first novel. She lives in San Francisco.
     

   • name: Esmé Weijun Wang

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2016-03-21T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Border of Paradise

fullDescription

In booming postwar Brooklyn, the Nowak Piano Company is an American success story. There is just one problem: the Nowak's only son, David. A handsome kid and shy like his mother, David struggles with neuroses. If not for his only friend, Marianne, David's life would be intolerable. When David inherits the piano company at just 18 and Marianne breaks things off, David sells the company and travels around the world. In Taiwan, his life changes when he meets the daughter of a local madame — the sharp-tongued, intelligent Daisy. Returning to the United States, the couple (and newborn son) buy an isolated country house in Northern California's Polk Valley. As David's health deteriorates, he has a brief affair with Marianne, producing a daughter.
It's Daisy's solution for the future of her two children, inspired by the old Chinese tradition of raising girls as sisterly wives for adoptive brothers, that exposes Daisy's traumatic life, and the terrible inheritance her children must receive. Framed by two suicide attempts, The Border of Paradise is told from multiple perspectives, culminating in heartrending fashion as the young heirs to the Nowak fortune confront their past and their isolation.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "Gothic in tone, epic in ambition, and creepy in spades."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
   • content: "A well-wrought multigenerational novel that also appeals for its honest look at mental illness."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Lit Hub
   • content: "Wang takes Ahab's rant of... 'madness maddened' and infuses it through all of the characters in this book, not just the ones who are identified as crazy. A terrifying look at dysfunction, manipulation, and psychological torture and love, yes love. A very deftly written first novel."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Vol. 1 Brooklyn
   • content: "Esmé Weijun Wang's new novel focuses on the complex relationships among a family with a prosperous business in the post-war United States, and the conflicts and questions of family that occur over time."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Adrienne Celt, author of The Daughters
   • content: "The Border of Paradise is a magnificent achievement – an exhortation for human tenderness and individual dignity in the most difficult of circumstances. Wang explores identity and family with a sense of drama that borders on gothic, without ever sacrificing the psychological texture that connects us to her characters."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion
   • content: "Esme Weijun Wang's relentlessly moving debut The Border of Paradise is a profound epic of potent darkness with all sorts of unexpected light. The story of the Nowak family contains notes of Lidia Yuknavitch, Christine Schutt, and Kevin Wilson, and yet remains unlike anything I've ever read. Trauma is rendered gorgeously, from every angle, within every possibility. Whether tackling New York, California, or Taiwan, Wang performs this novel with glorious courage, ambition, passion, and style."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Jennifer DuBois, author of Cartwheel
   • content: "A stunning meditation on the meaning of marriage, the limits of language, and the inescapable solitude of the mind. Esme Weijun Wang's writing is spellbinding; her characters are hauntingly alive."
8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 1, 2016
     A grievous unhappiness rakes across this novel about the slow self-destruction of the isolated Nowak family. Wang's debut begins with a suicidal David Nowak's reminiscences of his mid-20th-century childhood, which raises ghosts of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, both in style and in the self-flagellating obsessions of a neurotic boy. He spends his Brooklyn youth deep in a self-hatred from which he is occasionally rescued by his fixation on a neighbor girl, the lovely and innocent Marianne. When his father's sudden death leads to the hapless David's decision to sell the piano company he has inherited, Marianne abandons him under the pressure of her family's disdain, and so begins the series of events that becomes the death-seeking spiral that forms this novel. Not yet 20, David aimlessly lets his wealth take him to Taiwan, where he meets a bold bar girl named Jia-Hui Chen, whose "sappy, sloppy girlishness" makes his "nerves squirm with delight." David and the girl he renames Daisy alternate telling the story of the early years of their marriage, "hemorrhaging money" in California. Daisy's voice is brash and matter-of-fact, a welcome relief from David's morose, confessional detailing of his progressive madness. Eventually they hole up in a valley in the Sierras, "a place of brambling woods and mining shafts." Penned in first by David's aloofness and then by Daisy's growing paranoia, the Nowaks' world shrinks and becomes increasingly eccentric. When their overly obedient teenage son William picks up the narrative, his voice is an exact echo of his father's. So is his obsessive love for pubescent girls. Wang's deeply uncomfortable and somber novel is soaked with bizarre details, yet only in its final movements does the pace shift from static and entrapping to horrifically propulsive as the distant hope of escape glimmers. More focused on psychology than plot, Wang's novel remains extraordinarily unresolved, with sudden brutalities that send the story haring toward an unexpected, abrupt ending.Gothic in tone, epic in ambition, and creepy in spades.

     COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 15, 2016
     

     Growing up in postwar Brooklyn, David wholeheartedly believes everything his immigrant Polish parents say about their Novak Piano Company: the pianos are important not just to the world of music but to America itself. He's also enchanted by beautiful Marianne Pawlowski when she sings at their house, but their engagement is broken off; David's incipient mental illness emerges after he sells the company he inherits as an adolescent, and his life flounders over decades. Though readers know from the beginning that David will commit suicide, his decline is heartbreaking. VERDICT A well-wrought multigenerational novel that also appeals for its honest look at mental illness.

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

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In booming postwar Brooklyn, the Nowak Piano Company is an American success story. There is just one problem: the Nowak's only son, David. A handsome kid and shy like his mother, David struggles with neuroses. If not for his only friend, Marianne, David's life would be intolerable. When David inherits the piano company at just 18 and Marianne breaks things off, David sells the company and travels around the world. In Taiwan, his life changes when he meets the daughter of a local madame — the sharp-tongued, intelligent Daisy. Returning to the United States, the couple (and newborn son) buy an isolated country house in Northern California's Polk Valley. As David's health deteriorates, he has a brief affair with Marianne, producing a daughter.
It's Daisy's solution for the future of her two children, inspired by the old Chinese tradition of raising girls as sisterly wives for adoptive brothers, that exposes Daisy's traumatic life, and the terrible inheritance her children...

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2. • code: FIC025000
   • description: Fiction / Psychological
3. • code: FIC045000
   • description: Fiction / Family Life / General