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Rating: 
Summary: Not for Monkey King fans
Review: This book looks interesting on the cover. After all, it has praise by Anthony C. Yu himself! However, if you look past the author's attempts to shock you with the worst side of China, you'll see he has more knowledge of Native American trickster traditions and only just a vague idea of the Monkey King. In addition to many Chinese language errors there are tons of places where he gets Sun Wukong's story just wrong! The most amusing to me being of course that he refers to Anthony C. Yu's "Journey to the West" translation, yet gets the author's name wrong! :) But it looks like Mr. Yu held no grudge.The story is told in an interesting surreal style, but the plot itself is a rather cliched American man meets Asian woman tragedy. All in all this book remains a typical novel written in the Mid-80's when China bashing was in vogue and reading novels about it was a favorite assignment of college professors. It may have seemed original in it's day and may have contained some truth, but in 2001 it seems as stereotypical a depiction of PRC as much as older novels that depict China as a mysterious, exotic land with an inscrutable population that knows kungfu and ancient secrets.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the most challenging cross-cultural narratives around
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: One of the most challenging cross-cultural narratives around
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Hoot Loudly and Swing a Big Stick
Review: What, no reviews for a book which emerged from a tiny small press collective to become an American Book Award winner? Griever is a delight, a postmodern absurdist melange which offers a scathing indictment of suppression of human rights in China, and, more broadly, government and individual hypocrisy and the manner in which both big business and big government degrade human experience. Vizenor uses the common thread of the trickster in Native American and Chinese culture to present a fantasized version of his travels to China on an academic exchange program. He becomes a trickster Monkey King and all sorts of hell breaks loose. You can bet that the Chinese government will not be inviting Vizenor back soon, but I invite you to read Griever. It's a hoot! (Jim Dwyer is author of Earth Works: Recommended Fiction and Nonfiction about Nature and the Environment. Buy it here at amazon.com.)
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