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Chargement... Five Star Billionairepar Tash Aw
   Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  burritapal | Oct 23, 2022 |    ) siok | Dec 10, 2021 | I thought the ending was good but I couldn't see how all of the characters fitted together. I think I must have missed something (  ) karenshann | Dec 31, 2019 | otterley | Sep 6, 2016 |  ) jayne_charles | Mar 30, 2016 |
 Five Star Billionaire deploys telling detail and idiosyncratic perspective to evoke the logic and feel of contemporary China. The prose is lucid and unhurried, and Aw keeps an impressively tight rein on a sprawling narrative. Besides spanning languages and plots, it is also a primer on popular Chinese culture, covering hallmarks from the zealousness of online communities to self-help books and food stalls. The interlocking lives of the five Malaysian-Chinese living on the mainland are reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities in how they reveal social gears and levers. Just as Bonfire endeavoured to do for New York City, Billionaire renders a sweeping cross-section of modern Shanghai. But it does so obliquely, giving the measure of the city the way a disease might be revealed through patient histories. Aw excels at revealing the city's symptoms by layering detail upon detail - for instance, in this image of a rich Shanghainese girl as seen by Phoebe, a poor girl from a remote village in Malaysia: "Phoebe could not tell if she was pretty, but she sat the way a pretty girl would. Her dress was a big black shirt with loads of words printed all over it like graffiti, meaningless sentences … it was horrible but it was expensive, anyone could see that."  Five Star Billionaire is a brave, partly successful attempt to capture the size and variousness of Shanghai through the interlocking lives of five Malaysian Chinese immigrants, all searching for money and love: poor, unsophisticated, ambitious young Phoebe; rich, sophisticated, ambitious Yinghui; rich but unsophisticated and unambitious Justin, who is starting to crumble under the pressure of running his family’s commercial empire; pop icon Gary, who has left his poor, unsophisticated roots behind, thanks to a television talent contest, but who like Justin is crumbling; and the billionaire of the title, Walter Chao – the only character to get a first-person narrative, a fact that might put the reader on the alert for signs of unreliability. Long before the end, the book begins to feel dispiritingly under-imagined. We’re told too often what conversations are like – awkward, cheery – rather than given the dialogue that might enable us to judge; emotions are asserted but unfelt; and the business of moneymaking, around which so much of the novel revolves, is always discussed in the sketchiest terms: a big property deal at the heart of the book is annoyingly unconvincing. Five Star Billionaire contains a lot of useful and interesting information about the way the world wags these days; but are useful and interesting what you read a novel for?  Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire opens with a bang, not a whimper. Four Malaysians are trying to make it in Shanghai, the new capital of the eastern world – but when we meet them, each of their lives is in freefall. There's Phoebe, the ambitious young Malaysian village girl who passes herself off as Chinese and has arrived in Shanghai on the broken promise of a job and a new life. There's Gary, a "Taiwanese" pop star who finds his fall from grace in a Shanghai bar endlessly replayed on YouTube and is reduced to singing in shopping malls. There's Yinghui, a steely and successful businesswoman whose friends tell her that to really succeed in Shanghai, she needs a man. And, finally, there's Justin, the lonely businessman adopted into a wealthy Malaysian family, who has lost his way while his family have lost their fortune. He and Yinghui knew each other in an earlier life and their reconnection is one of the fine threads that link the characters in this book. Though how many of those threads are held by the fifth character, Walter Chao – the mysterious "I" and author of the bestselling self-help manual Five Star Billionaire – remains to be seen. Aw is a master storyteller and Five Star Billionaire can be read as The Way We Live Now for our times, for with the global triumph of capitalism, New York and London pale in comparison with the financial behemoth of Shanghai. Like Trollope's Augustus Melmotte, the mysterious Walter Chao has moved his base of operations to the new city: Phoebe, Yinghui, Gary and Justin stand in for the speculators and wealthy families ensnared by his plotting. At 400-plus pages, Five Star Billionaire is only half the length of Trollope's masterpiece. Still, it's a long book; and if there's a criticism to be made it is that the pace is too unvarying. Even where the narrative takes a dramatic turn, it is delivered in Aw's spare, fresh, cool, almost dispassionate prose, which though it succeeds in many ways somehow never quite leaves the page. Instead the characters drift towards their various destinies, caught in the whirlpool of Shanghai. There's more than a hint of fatalism in the air. Even when Yinghui is warned about her new business partner, she fails to conduct the most basic credit check on Walter Chao; she is too desperate, her dream too fragile. Behind it all, perhaps rather predictably, is a tale of ruin and revenge. But it matters little, because by the time you work out that what you thought was going to happen is indeed going to happen, you realise that Five Star Billionaire is a gentler story than at first appeared: one 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. At one point in Tash Aw's fine new novel about what people call "the new China" a young woman is trying to photograph herself on her mobile phone in a park in Guangzhou, hoping to enliven her internet dating profile with an image that doesn't make her look like an immigrant factory worker (which she is). An old man who sells tickets for the rowing boats on the lake offers to take the picture for her. He looks uncertainly at her phone. She wonders if he understands how to work it. Then he says: "This phone is so old. My grandson had one just like this three years ago when he was still in middle school." This is the world of the book, where traditional societies seem to have leapfrogged their way into a modernity without signposts, where the past isn't solid enough to build on but too substantial to be ignored. The five main characters, three men and two women, all come to Shanghai (by some definitions the world's largest city) from Malaysia, though their backgrounds range from old money to rural deprivation. As a title, Five Star Billionaire is close to brash, and the book's storyline could persuasively be pitched to a producer in search of a blockbuster miniseries, but the reading experience it offers is coolly engrossing – with elements of frustrating evasion – rather than propulsive. Tash Aw doesn't exactly kill plot momentum or the emotional impact of the situations he creates, but he certainly keeps them in check. Narrative hints are often indirect, like clues in a detective story, as when a passing reference to a character having written an article deploring the architecture of Gaudí suggests that a conversation almost a hundred pages earlier wasn't in fact spontaneous. Mr. Aw is a patient writer, and an elegant one. His supple yet unshowy prose can resemble Kazuo Ishiguro’s. The drawback to the author’s measured attack is that “Five Star Billionaire” is a long book that simmers without ever coming to a boil. This simmering quality is one that modern readers have grown used to, now that ambitious literary novels so reliably hopscotch among points of view. Our novelists, like our chefs, deliver long sequences of small plates. That thing that novels do so well, and that caused us to love them in the first place — envelop us, induce us to submit to the spell being cast — is repudiated. Can we pause for a moment to thank Charlotte Brontë for not hitting the shuffle button on “Jane Eyre,” splintering her novel into bite-size arias by Jane, Helen Burns, Mr. Rochester, Adèle Varens and Grace Poole? Prix et récompensesDistinctions
Dreaming of love and success in rapidly changing Shanghai, four individuals--a starry-eyed waitress, a wealthy developer's son, a pop artist, and a poetry-loving activist--confront unexpected realities in regional challenges. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Critiques des anciens de LibraryThing en avant-premièreLe livre Five Star Billionaire de Tash Aw était disponible sur LibraryThing Early Reviewers.  Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.42)
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5
I loved the author's depictions of The fast and furious society and Shanghai.
Phoebe is a young woman from Malaysia, a northern rural village. She makes her way to Shanghai, with the promise of a place to stay and a job working with a friend of hers, who has been emailing her. When she gets there, she finds out the friend is just using her to get her to pay the rent, as she has been fired from her job.
Phoebe gets a job through serendipity: just being in the right place at the right time. It all works out very well for her, and she studies self-help books in her quest to marry a rich man and succeed in getting the leisurely life she has always envisioned for herself.
From Phoebe's secret journal:
"do not let other people step on you.
Sometimes Shanghai bore down on her with the weight of 10 skyscrapers. The people were so haughty; their dialect was harsh to her ears. If someone talked to her in their language, she would feel attacked just by the sound of it. She had to come here full of hope, but on some nights, even after she had deposited all her loathing and terror into her secret journal, she still felt that she was tumbling down, down, and there was no way up. It had been a mistake to gamble as she did."
Justin and his brother were from the lim family. They had been filthy rich.Justin drops out of his role as fixer in the family. They would be celebrating New Year's.
Maybe one of the many reasons the rich people in this story fall from their towering heights is because of what they consume.
".. in recent years the family had even taken to having the New Year's Eve dinner in a hotel -- a servants were getting old, his mother had said, and they simply couldn't trust getting a young Filipina or Indonesian maid (she'd heard such horror stories: family heirlooms being stolen, phone bills full of calls to manila, people being killed in their own homes). So the family would Book a private room in the Chinese restaurant of a fancy hotel, 12 of them sitting in near-silence around a big table laden with food that would remain half consumed at the end of the evening. How lucky we are to have a family like this, his father would say at the conclusion of the meal. he said that every single year Justin could remember. But those extravagant banquets of bird's nest and shark-fin soups, whole suckling pigs, the finest New Zealand abalone, and strange sea creatures he hadn't even recognized -- perhaps they were all in the past, now that his family was ruined. He wondered if they were having more modest celebrations, or if they were celebrating at all. He imagined bitter recriminations: mother blaming father, brother blaming mother, grandmother blaming Uncle -- for the loss of their fortune, for their loss of their eldest son."
More of Phoebe's ruminations:
"... It was a proper matchmaking website for professional people, expensive to join, so she was naturally more optimistic when men sent her messages on this site. Of course, she had long since learned that the appearance of classiness in Shanghai was no guarantee of truthfulness, and she treated all approaches from men with the same caution as she would when shopping for counterfeit luxury goods. China was full of CopyCat products and people. She was now experienced enough to tell from one simple message whether a man was serious or not, whether he was just looking for sex, whether he was a married man in search of a mistress, or if he was indeed in need of a future wife. She could tell if a man was lying about who he was, about his job and income, where he was from. She could tell if he was from Beijing or if he was a Pakistani pretending to be from beijing. All the scam marriage proposals from indian, nigerian, and Arab men -- she was aware of them all; she did not even know what they wanted from her, but she made sure she stayed clear of them. She had become expert in the courtship rituals of the internet; no one could trick her with flowery words or insincere promises. To phoebe, internet dating had become like a book written in a language that she had mastered, just as she had conquered the rocky path to employment in shanghai.
..Being open and honest with a man is like asking him to drive over you with a bulldozer!"
And...:
"Her books had been right: men wanted only what they couldn't obtain.
She made the decision -- it was an easy one to make: she would use Walter for as long as she could; she had to be ruthless. She would accept the gifts of luxury handbags and Italian shoes and British raincoats and jewels from Hong kong. She would not only enjoy the fine dinners but also use the opportunity to learn about the Western countries he had visited. She would listen carefully to his stories about getting lost in Rome and his descriptions of the view from the Eiffel tower, and she would store them away for use one day, when she was at dinner with someone else, her true soulmate. She would accept all his offers of evenings at the Opera and ballet; she would use him to make herself better. Make use of as they would make use of you." (