Final work by Nobel prize-winning author of The Good Earth, continues her exploration of Chinese-American themes
A newly discovered manuscript by the American Nobel prize winner Pearl S Buck is set for publication this autumn, 40 years after her death.
Best known for her 1931 novel The Good Earth – a bestselling saga of a Chinese family which won her the Pulitzer – Buck took the Nobel in 1938, cited for "her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces". Over the course of her life, she wrote more than 80 books, a mix of novels, short stories, children's and non-fiction titles, and now, 40 years after her death in 1973, a new piece of work has been discovered.
Open Road Media, which will publish The Eternal Wonder in October, said the novel was completed shortly before Buck died, and was found in storage in January. In a joint statement, Buck's son Edgar Walsh, Open Road's Jane Friedman and agent Michael Carlisle of InkWell said that The Eternal Wonder was "as brilliant and inspiring as Pearl Buck's most famous works, and we look forward to readers across the world getting to enjoy this long-lost masterpiece this fall along with Buck's other wonderful books".
The novel is a coming-of-age story, said Open Road, about "an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris, on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever – and, ultimately, to love". While in Paris, Randolph Colfax – Rann – falls for Stephanie Kung, who "struggles to reconcile the Chinese part of herself with her American and French selves", while Rann "feels plagued by his voracious intellectual curiosity and strives to integrate his life of the mind with his experience in the world".
Buck grew up in China with missionary parents, moving back to the US in 1934. Her novels, starting with East Wind, West Wind, deal with the clash of East and West.
Buck's biographer Peter Conn said that while the author's work suffered a drop in quality during the 1940s, "there are probably passages of interest" in The Eternal Wonder because Buck was "an extraordinary woman who led an incomparably fascinating life".
"Pearl Buck strongly shaped Western and specifically American perceptions of China to an extent that had not been seen in the past," he told the New York Times. "She actually can make claim to a unique kind of cultural achievement, which is to prepare Americans for the increasingly tangled relationship … with China for the next 70 or 80 years."
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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