Five Star Billionaire
Tash Aw, 2013
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812994346
Summary
Long-listed for the Man-Booker Prize
An expansive, eye-opening novel that captures the vibrancy of China today.
Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job—but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn’t exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family’s real estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harbored a crush on Yinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman. Yinghui is about to make a deal with the shadowy Walter Chao, the five star billionaire of the novel, who with his secrets and his schemes has a hand in the lives of each of the characters.
All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel’s characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants.
Five Star Billionaire is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic novel that offers rare insight into the booming world of Shanghai, a city of elusive identities and ever-changing skylines, of grand ambitions and outsize dreams. Bursting with energy, contradictions, and the promise of possibility, Tash Aw’s remarkable new book is both poignant and comic, exotic and familiar, cutting-edge and classic, suspenseful and yet beautifully unhurried. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Raised—Kuala Lampur, Maylaysia
• Education—Cambridge University; University
of Warwick
• Awards—Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award;
Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region)
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Tash Aw, whose full name is Aw Ta-Shi is a Malaysian writer living in London
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, to Malaysian parents, he grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia before moving to England to study law at Jesus College, Cambridge and at the University of Warwick and then moved to London to write. After graduating he worked at a number of jobs, including as a lawyer for four years whilst writing his debut novel, which he completed during the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia.
His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was published in 2005. After Malaysian journalists reported that he had been paid over £500,000 for the novel, The Star and The New Straits Times called him the "RM3.5 million man," and local interest in his book deal continues today, even though the novelist himself has consistently denied the size of this advance, preferring to talk about the novel, which was longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award as well as the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region). It also made it to the long-list of the world's prestigious 2007 International Impac Dublin Award and the Guardian First Book Prize. It has thus far been translated into twenty languages. Aw cites his literary influences as Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, William Faulkner and Gustave Flaubert.
His second novel, titled Map of the Invisible World, was released in May 2009 to critical acclaim, with TIME magazine calling it "a complex, gripping drama of private relationships," and describing "Aw matchless descriptive prose" and "immense intelligence and empathy." His 2013 novel Five Star Billionaire has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.
Based on royalties as well as prizes, Aw is the most successful Malaysian writer of recent years. Following the announcement of the Booker longlist, the Whitbread Award and his Commonwealth Writers' Prize award, he became a celebrity in Malaysia and Singapore, and is now one of the most respected literary figures in Southeast Asia. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/7/2013.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Aw has an eye for status distinctions. There is some Edith Wharton, as well as some Tom Wolfe, in how he invests awareness of these distinctions with moral and financial peril. Five Star Billionaire…[is] a busy yet sophisticated portrait of life in one of the most populous cities on earth…Mr. Aw is a patient writer, and an elegant one…a writer to watch. He works high and low, and is as interesting to read on pop music as he is on finance or sibling rivalry.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
In Five Star Billionaire, the Taiwanese-born, Malaysian writer Tash Aw chooses a refreshingly novel perspective.... Through five distinct Malaysian-Chinese voices, Mr. Aw wonderfully expresses the grit and cosmopolitan glamour of Shanghai today.... Mr. Aw has done more than merely satirize a social milieu; he has created a cast of compelling characters, all of whom have come to Shanghai to remake themselves, yet are haunted by their pasts in ways that they barely understand.... In Five Star Billionaire, Mr. Aw has achieved something remarkable.
Wall Street Journal
[Aw’s] ever-spiraling web of connections is as improbable as it is entertaining, but he knits his various threads with an elegance...coupled with a photorealistic eye for the minutiae of urban life.
Boston Globe
Tash Aw’s brilliant new novel focuses on four Malaysian immigrants, all determinedly on the make.... The unputdownable story of how these lives interconnect and touch upon the billionaire of the title, a shadowy avenging angel, is played out against the noisy, glitzy backdrop of a society on the cusp between abandoning old values and embracing a lifestyle as flashy as its neon glow.
Daily Mail (UK)
Aw is a master storyteller and Five Star Billionaire can be read as The Way We Live Now for our times.... [It is a story] of lives lost and found, of the transience of material success and the courage required to hope and to trust again, to forgive oneself and to believe in the possibility of love.
Guardian (UK)
[Five Star Billionaire] aches with grieving humanity as it follows the crisscrossing ups and downs of five migrant characters trying to make their mark on contemporary Shanghai... Towering about them all is the theater of illusions that is the novel’s dominant character.... Sometimes it seems as if he has ingested every last detail of rising Asia’s latest glossy magazines, yet never lost sight of the emptiness in the models’ eyes or the wistfulness in the lonely readers’ hearts.... No one knows who anyone is—not even themselves—and when one character reveals himself as a (real) celebrity, he’s taken to be the most shameless fake of all.... Five Star Billionaire is hard to beat....
Pico Iyer - Time
Aw...follows five Malaysian immigrants in Shanghai as they try to realize the city’s dazzling promise.... These characters, whose lives intersect and overlap in the strangest of ways, create a portrait of an unforgiving city that “held its promises just out of your reach.” But like the characters, who are left confused and wanting more, one reaches the novel’s conclusion feeling disappointed.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) A literary victory.... Think of Aw’s third novel as an ingenious game called "How To Be a Billionaire."... The playing board is Shanghai, that twenty-first-century city of limitless possibility; the power broker is the epyonymous Five Star Billionaire. A quartet of players...are revealed one by one.... Aw moves fluidly between past and present, creating a multilayered narrative about chasing, catching, and sometimes losing elusive opportunities.(starred review)
Library Journal
Making it in Shanghai: Five immigrants find life challenging.... Character interaction is a relief from the long slabs of exposition. The only break has been the voice of Walter Chao, who addresses the reader directly. He has overcome poverty in Malaysia to become a successful businessman....but is he reliable or a con man?... The answer comes only at the very end, in one throwaway sentence, Aw having seemingly lost interest in his own handiwork.... A clunky novel.
Kirkus Reviews
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