On The Whole

Finished Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior today. I now realise that when I briefly wrote about it a week ago I hadn't grasped the extent to which it was important to place each chapter in relation to the whole. What I thought was a rather draggy second chapter, White Tigers, makes a lot more sense when you've finished the novel, or memoir, or whatever it is, and can see where Kingston will take its concerns.

Indeed, I'd say that the final two chapters quite brilliantly extend the earlier material whilst being highly readable in themselves. Considering just how fragmented the narrative is, I felt a very distinct sense of the unity of the text when I reached its conclusion, which is quite an achievement.