Griever: An American Monkey King in China

by Gerald Vizenor

Book Overview

Griever de Hocus, accompanied by his rooster, Matteo Ricci, plays havoc with the monolithic institutions of the People's Republic of China in Vizenor's inspired retelling of the classic Chinese Journey to the West. Fiction.

Griever de Hocus, accomopanied by his rooster, Matteo Ricci, plays havoc with the monolithic institutions of the People's Republic of China in Vizenor's inspired retelling of the classic Chinese Journey...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816618496
• ISBN13: 9780816618491
• Release Date: June 1990
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Griever

Vizenor writes with humor, sophistication, and captures the issues of Native American life, or more specifically mixed-blood Native American life in allegories that are akin to Jonathon Swift! Fun, and mind challenging!

For Native American AND Asian American literature buffs

Vizenor's book examines the interesting question of cultural parallelism, as he explores the similarities between Native American trickster traditions and the Chinese Monkey King tradition. Vizenor creates a wonderful double structure in which Griever's "Journey to the West" has two components--a Native American journey and a Chinese journey--and therefore requires that all the analogies to the Chinese Monkey tradition take two different forms--one for Griever and one for his Chinese colleagues. Fans of Journey to the West or Monkey should be interested in how he re-interprets these characters in light of the modern re-colonization of China by the West, while fans of Native American literature will enjoy seeing how he connects his own Indian tradition to its Chinese analogue.

One of the most challenging cross-cultural narratives around

Though flawed in some ways, "Griever" is a uniquely challenging and ambitious attempt to link the trickster traditions of two very different cultures. Vizenor is obviously a kind of bull-in-the-china-shop when it comes to Chinese mythology and China in general, and his narrative represents a misunderstanding or oversimplification of China in the 80's typical of many Western accounts of that era. But unlike others in this genre, Vizenor undercuts the sincerity or innocence of his Western protagonist with a trenchant warning about the dangers of cultural imperialism and intellectual arrogance.

With a taste for the bizzare

It was touching but I was out of touch with it. It worked the cultural rift eratically-gathering static for occaisional shocks.