Memoirs of a Geisha in Around the World in 80 Books

Oct 08, 2013 Bogdan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: new-world

This will be my first review using the guidelines I created for rating books. I hope this system will prove useful in the long term and help me judge my readings more uniformly, without making any favor.

So, to get it started, first I will discuss the novel's premise. For me this means the message that the novels wants to deliver to readers. Despite the fact the main conflict resolves until the end of the novel, this message is somehow unclear to me. It can be "follow your dream no matter what an This will be my first review using the guidelines I created for rating books. I hope this system will prove useful in the long term and help me judge my readings more uniformly, without making any favor.

So, to get it started, first I will discuss the novel's premise. For me this means the message that the novels wants to deliver to readers. Despite the fact the main conflict resolves until the end of the novel, this message is somehow unclear to me. It can be "follow your dream no matter what and it will eventually come true", but at the same time it can be that "love is so selfish and fulfilling it may mean sacrificing friendship". Both of them are proven true by the novel but a good novel must be having only one and that it should be clear. Also this premise should be considered true by the readers as well. At this moment, I am not convinced of the universal truth of the second premise. So, I will rate it with a 2 for this aspect.

On the form element, I believe it is one of the rarest cases of tremendous empathy from a male author writing a first person novel from a woman perspective. I am not sure if this is due to the fact that Arthur Golden is able to understand greatly Japanese geishas or it can be due to the fact that a great portion of the novel first person narration is coming from extensive research and interviews with real geishas. As long as there is not another novel written by the same author, it is quite hard to definitively tell which is the actual cause of this empathy.

Due to the great insight on Japanese society, similar with the one I found in Shōgun, and because there is a possibility of one of the rarest cases of good first person women prose written by a male writer, I am rating it at form with 4.

Regarding originality I must rate it with the highest score as this was the first ever novel I have read about geishas and also about the historical period of Japan between the 1930s to 1950s. I simply have no term of comparison in this regard. But also the idea of first person narration from a woman belonging to another culture than the male author, is definitively an original thing. So for this a 5.

On characters I definitively felt that main characters somehow grow over the time span covered by the novel. It is just that some of them showed lack of logic in taking certain actions. But as this deals mostly with characters from another culture, what I may think it is illogical, it can be pretty normal for them.

Sadly, the supporting characters are quite simple. But nobody would except they were crafted with so much attention that the main ones. So for this criteria, I will rate it with a 4.

Regarding the complexity and difficulty, I must admit this was perhaps one of the hardest novels that could have been written by an American author, as it deals with a foreign culture and does it beyond the common patterns from pop culture. I felt the passion and the deep research made by the author in order to understand the world and the characters described. On the negative side, I felt that the novel had many stretches were it insists on some of not so important descriptions. It also has some awkward time dilation periods, where it was not necessarily needed, especially at the beginning. And this makes it hard to stick with it for some category of readers. Due to these, I will rate it with a 4 for complexity and difficulty.

The last criteria is edition. I really liked this neat and graphically pleasing edition from Humanitas Publishing House. The contrast between the letter body and the background of the page is also very good and the paper used is again very nice. The only problem may be with few typos I could not ignore completely. So again a 4.

To summarize, the novel is entertaining, opening a door to a culture not so common for Westerners, but more important, helping us understand better the role of a geisha in Japanese society. I believe it does a great job at this and my final rating for the novel is 3.83, giving it 4 stars on Goodreads system.


+--------------------------+-----------------+
| Criteria | Rating |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Premise | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Form | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Originality | 5 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Characters | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Difficulty/Complexity | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Edition | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Total | 3.83 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+