Saving Fish From Drowning [ Sealed ]

Amy Tan

Easton Press, 2005. Limited Numbered First Edition. Full Leather. New / No Jacket as Issued. Item #5336

A handsome dark green Limited Numbered First Edition signed by the author on the limitation page and numbered one of 1,450 Limited Edition copies. In fine unread condition still in the original publisher's issue cellophane wrap, with gold gilt cover designs and page edges, moire silk endpapers and bound-in silk bookmark. Includes the Publisher's Note and Certificate of Authenticity from Easton Press.

Sealed editions of this title have become quite scarce over the years, contributing to its collectible status.

Tan’s novel is a surreal, darkly comic adventure about eleven American tourists on a guided art tour through Burma (Myanmar), narrated posthumously by their would-be guide, Bibi Chen. After Chen’s mysterious death, the group continues the journey without her, only to disappear into the Burmese jungle, where they are mistaken for religious figures by an isolated tribe. Tan spoke publicly about her anxieties around this novel, as she deliberately moved away from the mother-daughter narratives that defined her earlier success with “The Joy Luck Club.” During the writing process, Tan was diagnosed with Lyme disease and endured seizures, memory disturbances, and severe fatigue. Adding to it all was the devastating loss of her mother, who Tan frequently remarked was a central figure in both her life and her work, who died after a prolonged struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

In a 2005 interview with NPR, the always interesting Amy Tan mused about her mother’s influence on the novel even while not being directly about that relationship: “Bibi Chen, the character, the narrator of this book, is very much like my mother. If my mother had been educated in all those areas, if she spoke English a bit more fluently, then I think that much of the way Bibi talks about things—her observations, her honesty, her inappropriate remarks—are something that felt very natural to me, because I used in mind my mother’s voice.”

Tan’s ability to craft such a convincing narrative voice was so effective that it even misled critics, with Sharon Barrett of the Chicago Sun-Times initially believing that Tan’s introduction was intended to prepare readers for a nonfiction account.

In the same interview, Tan continues, “I was always keeping in mind that I needed to lure the reader, in the way fiction can be seductive and subversive, to a place most of us don’t want to go. So my charge was a very simple one: Get people hooked into a story with whatever genre worked – romantic comedy, adventure, murder-mystery, the whole shebang – and get them to this very dark place and simply get people to remember the country Burma, that it’s now called Myanmar, that there are people who are suffering and dying."

Price: $275.00  other currencies