Scan barcode
dani7silver's review against another edition
4.0
Pearl S. Buck provides a lovely autobiographical tale of her experiences shooting the film "The Big Wave" in Japan and the death of her husband. Her interweaving of the details of contemporary Japanese life and the clash between westernization and the preservation of traditional culture and nostalgic stories, both good and bad, of her late husband provide interesting context to her life. I find her to be an extremely interesting character, who was born in the East and became a prolific writer of Eastern stories in the west, and her writing style continues to amaze me. This book was very lovely, and provided me with a nice insight into the mind of this wonderful author.
beththebookdragon's review against another edition
4.0
A gently beautiful book of a period of grieving, interwoven with Pearl S. Buck's return visit to Japan in the early 1960s to participate in turning her book "The Big Wave" into a movie.
xterminal's review
4.0
Pearl S. Buck, A Bridge for Passing (Pocket, 1962)
The strength of Pearl Buck's writing, it becomes evident from page one, is in her ability to tell a story as if she were sitting next to you sipping lemonade on an unseasonably cool August day. Her observations are flowery, well-described, and often at least a touch naïve; one wonders, had she written the book ten years later, if it would have had the same tone it does.
A Bridge for Passing intertwines the filming of her novel The Big Wave, the first major collaboration between Japanese and American filmmakers (and now unforgivably obscure), with the death of her husband of twenty-five years. And oddly, though the ratio of the two in page real estate is about 90/10, the reviews, the blurbs, and the cover reverse the ratio when talking about the book. To the rest of the world, it seems, A Bridge for Passing was a precursor to the spate of books that started appearing roughly a decade later about how to handle major life crises. The movie was just an afterthought.
Not so, Othello. The movie is the mechanism by which Buck learns to deal with her grief, true, but there is much more to it than that. This is no fictional memoir; we are treated to the lives of real people, most of whom have remained obscure from the American perspective, but some of whom are not (Big Wave director Ted Danielewski, for example, has a pair of kids well known to media critics, House of Leaves author Mark Danielewski and his sister, the singer known as Poe). And when one keeps one's mind on the idea that these are real people, one starts to realize the enormity of the task Buck and her cohorts have set themselves. This is not just an on location shoot, this is politics of the highest order (and only fifteen years after the unpleasantness at the end of World War II).
There is much to be said for the way in which her husband's death pervades the book, but any Buck fans who have avoided this, fearing it to be nothing but a celebrity-penned self-help tome, put your fears at ease. This one's a keeper. *** ½
The strength of Pearl Buck's writing, it becomes evident from page one, is in her ability to tell a story as if she were sitting next to you sipping lemonade on an unseasonably cool August day. Her observations are flowery, well-described, and often at least a touch naïve; one wonders, had she written the book ten years later, if it would have had the same tone it does.
A Bridge for Passing intertwines the filming of her novel The Big Wave, the first major collaboration between Japanese and American filmmakers (and now unforgivably obscure), with the death of her husband of twenty-five years. And oddly, though the ratio of the two in page real estate is about 90/10, the reviews, the blurbs, and the cover reverse the ratio when talking about the book. To the rest of the world, it seems, A Bridge for Passing was a precursor to the spate of books that started appearing roughly a decade later about how to handle major life crises. The movie was just an afterthought.
Not so, Othello. The movie is the mechanism by which Buck learns to deal with her grief, true, but there is much more to it than that. This is no fictional memoir; we are treated to the lives of real people, most of whom have remained obscure from the American perspective, but some of whom are not (Big Wave director Ted Danielewski, for example, has a pair of kids well known to media critics, House of Leaves author Mark Danielewski and his sister, the singer known as Poe). And when one keeps one's mind on the idea that these are real people, one starts to realize the enormity of the task Buck and her cohorts have set themselves. This is not just an on location shoot, this is politics of the highest order (and only fifteen years after the unpleasantness at the end of World War II).
There is much to be said for the way in which her husband's death pervades the book, but any Buck fans who have avoided this, fearing it to be nothing but a celebrity-penned self-help tome, put your fears at ease. This one's a keeper. *** ½
More...