Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Death's End by Ken Liu

2017; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 91; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2017.0248

1945-8134

Michael A. Morrison,

American and British Literature Analysis

When he meets Willow Azarian in a bar in the dodgy neighborhood of Parkdale, where he grew up and currently lives among drug dealers and prostitutes, he doesn’t immediately believe that she’s immensely wealthy. But over the course of a series of visits, he learns that the heroin-addicted Willow is the daughter of Robert Azarian, a late billionaire who left each of his five children a fortune. But he also left each a unique art object that, Willow suspects, contains clues to a further inheritance, to be found after the father’s death. Enlisting Tancred in her plan to steal each object and solve the mystery , Willow draws him into a messy world of suspicion, greed, and family dynamics that almost costs Tancred his friendships, career, and life. Toronto itself lies at the heart of this story, playing the role of a map for Tancred’s search and serving as a unique melting pot where class and race boundaries fall. The wildly wealthy Azarians, the charming gentleman thief Tancred, and a cast of surly and violent lesser characters mingle, argue, and bond as they circle one another. All hail from different backgrounds and places, immigrants who came or whose families came to Canada and carved out lives of varying quality in the same city. In a time when inequality seems to have created insurmountable barriers, the Toronto Alexis has captured is touching and inspiring. But the novel is far from a simplistic romp. It is gritty, dangerous, and tense throughout, built in large part on Tancred’s own ability to read people and circumstances . The objects he must track down and steal are varied: re-creations of a painting , a framed poem, an alcohol bottle, and a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, in addition to a screen given to him by Willow . But each item holds a clue that sends him across the city and into alliances with a British artist-turned-taxidermist and with a drug dealer and his vicious muscle, and threatens his long friendships with a nihilist baker and a detective assigned to investigate the very thefts Tancred is carrying out. Riveting from cover to cover, The Hidden Keys is an old-fashioned mystery blended with a sharp portrait of modern Canadian identity. Bridey Heing Washington, DC Cixin Liu. Death’s End. Trans. Ken Liu. New York. Tor. 2016. 608 pages. Death’s End concludes Cixin Liu’s trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which began with the multiple-award-winning The Three-Body Problem (2014) and continued with The Dark Forest (2015; see WLT, Sept. 2015 and March 2016, for reviews). Those two novels told of humanity’s first encounter with an extraterrestrial civilization: the inhabitants of the planet Trisolaris in the Alpha Centauri star system . A highly advanced but doomed race, the Trisolarians set out in the spirit of the Martians in H. G. Wells’s seminal alieninvasion novel The War of the Worlds (1897) to conquer and colonize Earth. The irresistible drive of Liu’s storytelling carried us through the continuous narrative of these two long novels to a point of apparent closure. The invasion is stopped before the Trisolarians reach Earth. The two civilizations come to an accommodation and initiate exchange of scientific, technological, and cultural information. But The Dark Forest did conclude with a cliff-hanger: where could Liu take us in the third book? Surprisingly, he takes us back to the beginning, just after the Trisolarians have discovered the existence of Earth. He then retells the events of the first two novels from the viewpoint of new characters. Via an unexpected plot twist, he pushes that story further to a definitive end of the interaction of humanity with the Trisolarians. But hundreds of pages remain. So Liu introduces a hitherto unmentioned, far more deadly alien threat and plunges humanity into a crisis on a truly cosmic scale, one that encompasses multiple universes and billions of years. Liu is a maximalist. His novels abound with detailed discussions of politics, philosophy , sociology, and, especially, science. His specialty is the conceptual breakthrough : a revelation that radically alters our perception of the universe. Liu’s universe is inherently immoral, a...