A review by jbrendanshaw
Delayed Rays of a Star by Amanda Lee Koe

4.0

This book has a distinctive style - blending a kind of chatty historical reportage with more involved character studies. The book takes as its starting point a photograph taken in 1928 of German actress Marlene Dietrich, Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, and infamous German director Leni Riefenstahl. The book unwinds from there moving across the three women's intersecting lives and various figures in their orbit including Walter Benjamin, a Chinese immigrant to France, the crew members of Riefenstahl's film Tiefland, and Josef von Sternberg. The sections on Riefenstahl's inner world were least interesting simply because she is written in such a defensive posture and I imagine most contemporary readers would find this a bit ponderous. The discussion of her failed film shoot is fascinating. The stories of Wong and Dietrich are both utterly compelling. I can see that some readers might find this book a bit tedious as it often tells us about historical and cinematic facts without showing but I found myself swept up as it went along.