My Last Empress: A Novel

The Washington Post - Eugenia Zukerman

While danger and drama accelerate into a whirlwind of events, Da Chen never loses control of this complex story. In turns intoxicating, repellent, mystical and demonic, the novel challenges, provokes and surprises the reader with its shifting mood. My Last Empress will take you on an astonishing journey.

Publishers Weekly

Chen's (Brothers) 19th-century tale of obsession explores the line between love and madness. After Samuel Pickens's first love, Annabelle, perishes in a fire a month into their adolescent romance, her spirit stays with him through Yale and beyond, an invisible partner who reigns over him. Later, an adult Pickens acquires a position as tutor to the teenage emperor of China's Qing Dynasty and travels to the country where his beloved spent her childhood. There, he finds a royal palace overrun with corrupt eunuchs and led by a callow and unprepared emperor. Pickens is soon befriended by his effeminate pupil, but the tutor becomes enamored with 13-year-old Empress Qiu Rong, fourth wife of the emperor and Annabelle's doppelgänger. Their ensuing perverse love affair is complicated by the schemes of various parties, but together they navigate the traps set for them, seeking assistance from a local warlord and other shady individuals. Steeped in the language and colors of an Asia long gone, this florid, Lolita-esque tale focuses too narrowly on the narrator's lost love and misses its potential to be a sweeping historical epic. Agent: Alex Glass, Trident Media Group. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

“Nabokov meets Dream of the Red Chamber. . . A lyrical tale of crossed borders, boundaries and destinies, expertly told.” –Kirkus, starred review
 
“A wonderful tale of passionate obsession…the prose is elegantly inviting.” –Library Journal

“The best romance stories are always the most fearless…Sweeps you away with visions of a bygone age of royal extravagance…Fans of sweeping historical romance like Gone with the Wind and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, as well as fans of transgressive sexual explorations like Nabokov’s Lolita, will find another engrossing story in My Last Empress. It’s both moving and frightening, dark and hopeful, gut-wrenching and inspiring. Chen has delivered another powerful work in an already stellar career.” —Bookpage

“Chen’s lyrical prose enhances and deepens the eerie tone of this atmospheric melodrama.” —Booklist

“Steeped in the language and colors of an Asia long gone… Chen’s…19th-century tale of obsession explores the line between love and madness.” —Publishers Weekly

"In My Last Empress, Da Chen pushes the reader into the strangest corners of the human heart, with a style of pure creepy gorgeousness. Like a fan opening, vane by mysterious vane." —Janet Fitch, New York Times bestselling author of White Oleander and Paint it Black
 
Da Chen's My Last Empress is an intoxicating and consistently surprising historical novel that delves into the nature of erotic passion, obsession and phantasmagoric haunting with vivid descriptive flourishes that evoke the courtly life of 19th century imperial China. Set against the backdrop of both New England and China, the narrative masterly interweaves the story of narrator Samuel Pickens going in search of his deceased beloved while stumbling upon the intrigue and mysterious machinations of the Chinese emperor, a world full of eunuchs, warlords, and concubines, replete with loyalty and betrayal. Simultaneously a timeless love story and a dazzling tale of dangerous infatuation, My Last Empress brings the reader along on a sensual and astounding journey of self-discovery and cultural revelation. A truly original novel written by one of our most inspired bicultural writers.” —Ravi Shankar, Pushcart Prize winning poet and Founding Editor of Drunken Boat

"If you took the love child of J.D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald, then raised him in China, you would get something close to the beauty, truth, and elegance of the words of Da Chen in My Last Empress." — John Buffalo Mailer, author of Hello Herman and The Big Empty
 
Da Chen has followed Nabokov's dictum to caress the detail beautifully, with a calligraphic touch, to create an enchanting tale and a picaro journey through the vanities of the American upper classes with many surprising twists, humor, eros, and profound psychological insights.” — Josip Novakovich, American Book Award and Whiting Award winning author of April Fool's Day

Library Journal

In this erotic historical novel, an American abroad becomes obsessed with a young girl who reminds him of a lost love in the emperor's court. (LJ 10/1/12)

Kirkus Reviews

Nabokov meets Dream of the Red Chamber. Chen (Brothers, 2006, etc.), a Chinese-born writer and now resident of New York's Hudson Valley, has a profoundly developed feel for the sweep of history--though here, unlike in Brothers, he compresses what might have been a saga into 300 pages. His story has an epic feel all the same: Samuel Pickens, a Yankee born into wealth and privilege, falls into head-swooning love with the daughter of a New England missionary who has spent her youth in China. Alas, their young love is fleeting, but events pull Samuel across the ocean and into a web of mystery, not least the fact that, years later, Samuel comes into contact with a young woman in the imperial court who looks very strangely like his lost love. The discovery turns Samuel's world upside down, of course. Chen is a master of suggestion by telling detail: Of the man who teaches Samuel Chinese, for example, he writes, "No one had taught us more with less," while Samuel's plans first come a cropper with a potential employer's being "choked to death by butterflies in his throat"--a neat allusion to Madama Butterfly there, perhaps. Chen sets up the enigma that Samuel must decipher before the first act closes, and though the solution isn't deeply buried, he takes his time in uncovering it elegantly. For those with an eye for such things, Chen also does a nice job of serving up literary erotica of a sort to do Colette proud: "Then she rode with gentleness, as if the horse beneath her was trotting on a soft path; her rosebud breasts heaved and her hair tossed with each motion." A lyrical tale of crossed borders, boundaries and destinies, expertly told.