20 ~ Friday, Septeinber 3, 1999 — North Shore News a

invented history a oripping ta

Katharine Hamer Contributing Writer

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, Vintage Canada, 434 pp, $17.95 In his debut novel, already an international best- seller, American author

Arthur Golden gets deep inside che mind of a complex woman: Nitta Sayuri, one of Japan's “best-known geisha.” As an invented biography, the book is a feat in itself: many attempts at the genre fail miserably at both narra- tive and character. But Golden also manages to exe- cute a deft, intuitive, and Passionate portrait of a tradi- ticnal Japanese woman. Memoirs of a Geishe is rich in its use of language, and utterly gripping in its story-

SGHH EORMAAM SER WART

M6 Bae OF TESICHDiATE PEAS

Barkerville portraits

AN exhibition cf portraits by photographer C.D. Hoy opens tomorrow at Presentatisn House Galler; Born in China in 1885, Hoy came to Canada as a teen and settled in Barkerville where he tock portraits of Chinese miners, the Chilcotin natives and area settlers. The show is accompanied by a book about Hoy.

line. Obiects as simple as a kimono are described in ornate visual detail, like the “orange silk with a silver waterfall pouring from the knee into a slate-bluc ocean.”

Reading Golden’s words, you are transported to pre- war Kyoto, with its arched wooden bridges, lily ponds, cobbled streets and dimly-lit tea- houses.

An intriguing history of a long-forgotten era and a classic fairy-tale, the book is also astonishingly adept at elucidating the cunning ways of women and the “Tuthless motivations of men.

Bicycle Days by John Burnham Schwartz, Vintage Contemporaries, $17.95

“She said she loved those bicycle days, the way they made her feel like a girl again. And it seemed to Alec as he listened to her that nothing that good could ever stop, that all days would be bicycle days, and that he need only turn his head to find her there behind him, her arms outstretched, reaching for hi him as he rushed round the park with the wind in his

ce.”

Like Memoirs, Bicycle Days is a coming-of-age story set in Japan which goes some way towards demystifying castern cul- ture.

But its central character is worids apart. Alec is a cocksure young American who has come to Japan to work at 3 com-

See Discards Page 24

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