BookJack talks about the novel: "Crazy Rich Asians" by Kevin Kwan. This is a simple melodrama that develops against the backdrop of complex multi-layered descriptions of the life of high society in Singapore.
KEVIN KWAN is the author of Crazy Rich Asians, the international bestselling novel that has been translated into more than 30 languages. Its sequel, China Rich Girlfriend, was released in 2015, and Rich People Problems, the final book in the trilogy, followed in 2017. For several weeks in 2018, the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy commanded the top three positions of the New York Times bestseller list - an almost unprecedented single-author trifecta, and the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians became Hollywood's highest grossing romantic comedy in over a decade. In 2018, Kevin was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Chinese-American Rachel Chu, a young and promising economics professor at New York University, accepts an invitation from her boyfriend and colleague, history professor Nick Young, to attend his best friend's wedding together and then spend the holidays in Southeast Asia. However, agreeing to this deceptively innocent plan, Rachel does not suspect that her lover is five minutes away the crown prince: he belongs to one of the oldest and richest families in Singapore. Needless to say, Nick's numerous relatives (as well as all Singaporean beauties of marriageable age) are not happy with the girl with whom he comes to his home, and by all means they are trying to escort the one who is considered a presumptuous money hunter. The drama is fueled by the fact that exactly at this moment, cousin Nika Astrid experiences a painful break with her husband: their marriage, made out of great love, is collapsing due to too much difference in the social and property status of the spouses.
Flat, one-dimensional, everything, as if by choice, impeccably beautiful characters can hardly count on even a small fraction of the reader's empathy. Worse, some of them give the impression of not just cardboard dolls, but cardboard dolls hastily glued together from several standard blanks at once. So, the author obviously could not decide in time what role to assign to the best friend of the main character - the Insidious Villain or the Sorceress-Godmother, and as a result, an intricate hybrid of both came out. Melodramatic, through and through artificial intrigue does not hold any surprises, so if anxiety for the fate of Nick and Rachel crept into your heart even for a moment, drive it away. Well, the dialogues are built so clumsily that they can be read diagonally without a twinge of conscience or even flipped through.
If you remember the unforgettable series of romance novels "Harlequin" and wondered what, in fact, a book like "Crazy Rich Asians" does in this review, you are certainly right. However, there is an answer to this question, and in order to get it, the reader will have to look from the foreground to the backdrop. It is there - in the mysterious, practically unknown to the European reader, but native to Kevin Kwan, the world of the Asian elite, everything really interesting happens.
Dazzling mansions, hidden from prying eyes and not displayed even on Google Maps; underground dog fighting arenas and luxury casinos in Macau; closed resorts, private jets, street food stalls and secret outlets where the wives of Singaporean and Hong Kong magnates buy thousands of dollars of fake handbags, the originals of which are worth tens or even hundreds of thousands. But Kwan (himself a native of Singapore’s high society) is not limited to describing all this: from his novel we learn how he lives, how he furnishes homes and how this vicious circle of disastrously rich Asians raises children, what activities are considered decent for girls, and which ones for boys, how these people relax, how they communicate with each other, what they eat, how they treat strangers, and where this ancient caste of eastern rich people came from. And the witty author's notes and remarks supplementing the text make it possible to suspect that Kevin Kwan is not at all as simple as it might seem at first.
Why the author needed to craft a mediocre novel out of what could have been the material for an ideal, exciting non-fiction, we can only guess - probably, Kwan himself was not without his signature pragmatism, which was caustically noted by even the richest representatives of the Asian beau monde. However, with some restructuring of the optics, Nick, Rachel and other clowns, grimacing near the ramp, practically cease to interfere. Moreover, with their own clumsiness, they set off the luxury and alluring mystery of the scenery created by Kevin Kwan.
This article was sponsored by Igor Levin
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