Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan

The Verdict: Unfocused and unpolished, but engaging and thought-provoking.

Amy Tan is one of my favorite authors. The novel she's most known for is "The Joy Luck Club", but I think "The Kitchen God's Wife" is her best work. "Saving Fish" is an interesting deviation from her typical themes of mother-daughter relationships and Chinese-American culture clashes. It's fun to read something new from her, even if it doesn't outshine the others. "Saving Fish" is the story of a group of American tourists in Burma/Myanmar who wind up kidnapped by a politically oppressed tribe. The books biggest weakness is that it tries to be everything - a bit of a mystery, part travelogue, semi-romantic, some comedy, some politics, and some tragedy. It's too much to pull together into a really good story, but it makes it interesting, too. I guess I feel like there are a lot of really good pieces to this book, even if they don't all come together perfectly.

I wondered for a while about the introduction, in which Tan claims to have dictated this story from the promptings of the deceased spirit of one Bibi Chen, a Chinese-American antiques dealer and humanitarian socialite. It's an interesting frame for the story, giving the book a, omniscient narrator who maintains a personally. This is perhaps the only book I've ever read with such a narrator, and the unique perspective provides some intriguing possibilities. I'd love to read more books with a narrator like this. The intro is as fictional as the rest of the book, however, as she assures us in this interview, which addresses a lot of other interesting points in the book. Bibi Chen never existed outside of Tan's imagination, but it's a great frame for a book that questions the line between fiction and reality.

I also enjoyed reading about the origin of the title. Buddhists believe in doing harm to no living thing, but often find justification to do just that. Tan tells the story of a Buddhist fisherman who goes out every day and pulls in thousands of fish in his nests, saying that he is saving the fish from drowning. He lays them on the shore where they obviously die. Then he takes them sadly to market, so as not to waste them, and uses the money to buy more nets so he can save more fish from drowning. One major theme in the book is intentions and consequences, and it's a frightening example of terrible things happening inadvertently despite good intentions, or very purposefully under the guise of good intentions.

I've never read anything before about Burma, but this book sparked my interest. I'm waiting for "Freedom From Fear" and "The Voice Of Hope" from Amazon, and I'm surprised at how often I hear the political situation there mentioned now. Jim Carrey even posted about it on YouTube. So without any mention of that stupid starfish story, I've decided that although I can't fix everything in the world, Jim Carrey has convinced me that I can do something about this. I'll post about Aung San Suu Kyi's books when I finish them and let you know how it's going. Want to join me? Check out Carrey's video to find out how!