Help! Ever read the book "The joy luck club?" I need Help on some of the
chapters!  HELP if you can

32 responses total.

What kind of help?

quit

Someone have a book report due? <grin>

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I read the book and thought it was great.  I also read The Kitchen Gods wife
because I liked TJLC so much.

I also know that Amy Tan sang in this rock band organized by Stephen King in
black fishnet stockings and black shorts and sounded really bad.  Read her 
books, don't hire her for your barmitzvah.

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Yeah.. I think Dave Barry was in int also... and yes they did suck. How King
could organize such a monstrosity is beyond me. They sucked BAD>

d'oh someone slipped in

 At least King doesn't write as bad as he plays the guitar. ;)

Would someone please give synopses of tjlc and tkg? 

story of four Chinese mothers and their experiences raising children.
<that's a mighty short synopsis and inherently incomplete>
  
read the book, wanted to see the flick (haven't). it's an amazingly
subtle adn sensitive story. the flow risks putting the reader to sleep
but it's an excellent read nonetheless. i can recommend TJLC for more
than just PC 'sensitivity training.'

Yes.  I would not say that the flow of the stories tended to put me to 
sleep, however, I do think that *The Joy Luck Club* exemplifies a 
stylistic notion that has already become prevelant in much of the 
recently published fiction that I have been reading.  More than just a 
few writers nowadays put forth novels that resemble a collection of short 
stories.  In *TJLC*, the stories connect with one another because the 
individual narrations must be separately told by the individuals at the 
gaming table.  As in life, the only common thread in the stories seems to 
be that each story reveals an ordeal for each narrator to overcome (not 
always with success).  The formal structure of the weekly maj jong game 
brings these very different stories into the same room.  The pretense for 
assembling these verydifferent  stories could have just as well have 
been  set at a bridge table, a bowling league game or the break room of a 
factory.

Ms. Tan writes exceedingly well.  I would like to point out the first 
story told by "The Chess Player" as  a concise, well-written short story 
initself, worthy of consideration along with the works of H. H. Munro.  
It is a jewel of literature, and that should be evident to all who take the 
time to read it--if nothing else in the book.  (Was it chapter 3?  I 
don't have a copy in front of me and I read it long ago.)

(Response #12 sounds like excellent book report material... :)

Um, Rane or Jim, this one seems like a natural to link to books cf.

A collection of short stories tied together by a frame story is hardly a new
stylistic notion.  It's quite a bit older than the notion of the novel.

 maybe. ;)

Re #15: "Arabian Nights" pops to mind.

I have linked spring agora 93 to books 51. 

The Canterbury Tales, I suppose for the earliest.   I do, however, 
persist in the notion that my selections have  resulted in a number of 
novels that are structurally resemble short stories more than they 
resemble novels of Dickens or Austin.

Well,  it might just be the selection, but I'm not consciously looking 
for novels that are structured like *The Joy Luck Club*.

Getting back to the topic:  I also saw the movie and I thought that it 
did a slightly better job dramatizing the story of the woman who 
abandoned her child.  But read the book!  Tan is an excellent word-smith.

I agree that the form has enjoyed something of a revival.  John Barth has a
lot of fun in with it in several of his stories, including spiralling frame
tales.  I think Chaucer and the Arabian Nights are both 14th century.  Dunno
where the form originated.

Would you count the Love Boat and Fantasy Island among this form of story?

Borderline.  There is a frame setting and a frame cast, but not much of a
frame story.

Sherlock Holmes.....

Homer?

huh?  double huh?

Doyle wrote "a collection of short stories tied together by a frame story".
The frame story has the same cast of characters, while bit-parts are 
played by minor characters in the separate stories. 

Hmmm...I don't see that as a frame story.  Just a series of short stories.
In the Arabian Nights, there is a story of how a king was betrayed by a woman
and grew to distrust and hate all women so much that he took to bedding
another every night and killing her in the morning.  Shaherazade distracts
him from this scheme by telling him stories each night, with cliffhanger
endings.  Many of the stories are designed to disuade him from his scheme.
As I recall, in the Cantebury tales, the frame story is less fully formed,
not really much of a story in its own right.  Decameron falls somewhere
between, with the stories illustrating points in the tellers discussions with
each other.  These other examples (Love Boat, Sherlock Holmes) have a frame,
but no frame story that I can detect.

As in, "Homer's Odyessy", which had a number of adventures that are sort of
separate stories, except that there is a time-line involved linking them
together.  Good fodder for story telling.

Homer was what came to my mind, when the quetion of the oldest one came up.
But the Odessy really is one episodic story - the framing story is related
to the episodes much more directly than with (say) the Arabian Nights or the
Canterbury Tales or (I think - haven't read it) The Joy Luck Club.  In these,
the framing story is a framework for the stories to be *told*, not for them
to *happen*.

What Jan said about Holmes etc.  The frame is a context, not a story, and is
in fact not narrated at all.  (Um.  That's strictly speaking true of the
Odessy as well, I suppose.  But the larger story, Odysseus's homeward journey
& homecoming, is a main part of the author's aim, not a side effect as in
Doyle.)

The classic frame story is a story in which characters tell stories.  In the
Arabian Nights, many of the stories Shaherazade tells contain characters who
tell stories themselves, so there are frame stories within frame stories.

I think some of you should reread Doyle. All the "stories" are just one
story about Holmes, Dr. Watson, their housekeeper, Prof. Moriarty,
Inspector Lazare, etc. Every episode harks back to events in previous
episodes. The "frame story" is about Holmse's family, associates, friends
and enemies, the development of his craft and meditations upon it. The
details of particular cases are an author's device for keeping an audience
for the "frame story". 

<fitz ducks as books are flung across the room>

I guess that I should have qualified my remark about the Canterbury Tales
for an example in the English language.  I suppose that the Tales of 
the Arabian Nights would be an example, but not the *Illiad*.

Where's my copy of *The Joy Luck Club*?

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