i never "dnf" books because i'm stubborn but i dropped this so fast.
this book has the most bizarre storytelling choices i have ever encountered.

This was epic!! Truly had a hard time putting it down. Excellent writing and I was honestly more drawn to the minor characters though of the 3 main ones, Anna May Wong was by far my favorite. ( )

Would you dare to make stars like Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich move on the page? What about a director like Leni Riefenstahl who directed Nazi propaganda films (popularly "Triumph of the Will")? Would you dare even have Hitler himself move on your page? To have him speak again? That was what I thought as I read this book, that it takes a certain great audaciousness to write a piece of historical fiction that takes the lives of big figures, and even one of the evilest humans, to move and bend to the will of your writing.

The book is dense & in the beginning, I struggled a little with the writing because Amanda will really tunnel deeply into whatever context the page is set in & write specific details & descriptions & foreign words. You will see these details weaved at the level of the sentence. Instead of a German housewife, you will read—hausfrau. Ribbons are described as celadon-green. We hear of a Yéniche hashish gang. I turned to the dictionary a lot because I was not content with not understanding. The writing itself is unmatched in its beauty & lyricism. Eventually, you get used to being sucked into the world that has been intricately & laboriously built. As much as the book is about these 3 stars, other minor characters also appear & have equally interesting side stories that help contextualise the time.

Because these 3 actresses are so politicised (especially Leni), throughout the book I notice that perpetual strain of aesthetics/art vs politics. An art student wants to take down the entrance words of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp "Arbeit Macht Frei" meaning "Work Makes (You) Free" but apparently he wasn't intending to make so much a political statement but an artistic one. This artist also is described to be snubbed by "antifa girls". Anna May Wong gets the upper hand of a pedantic critic by saying (this is from my memory it might not be entirely accurate word by word): "The truth of an Artist is not in her life so much as her work. Now, did I not dance beautifully?".

There was one section that I was uncomfortable with which was the narration by a condescending publisher about supposedly ignorant rural peasant girls who were seduced by a man who spoke to them with political slogans they didn't understand, had rice wine orgies with him, & thus seduced, participated in Tiananmen Square: "Even if you don’t understand the principles, you can still chant democratic slogans, am I right?" I didn't feel comfortable with the way it was relayed, especially with peasants supposedly being ignorant & naive because they didn't understand some political theory (btw one thing I remember someone telling was "workers don't revolt because they read, they revolt because of their own lives,"!). Of course, this is the voice of the obnoxious editor, but then there's that usage of historical trauma for some heavily aestheticised text, & underlying those passages was a kind of disdain of politics, that runs throughout the novel. (This section is in fact reproduced online on Granta:"The Sole Purveyor of Madame Bovary in Beijing).

I was wondering why this tension is so apparent throughout & I realised, it is probably because if we want to deeply understand these 3 women as they are, it can feel as if the political symbol they become is heavyhandedly imposed & obscures the truth of their life & personality. How do we understand Leni as an individual woman if we cast aside the constant bombardment of her as a Nazi? In chapters dedicated to Leni, we see Leni trying to absolve herself & it's interesting because she does what a lot of contemporary white feminists do which is to weaponise this one aspect of difference she has—womanhood–to claim some sympathy: ~ah, of course you would be so skeptical & condemnatory to a woman who has had to struggle so much as a filmmaker at the time!~ All she had ever wanted to do was make beautiful, epic films. Filmmaking is her life! And now these political critics have ruined that for her. I think these chapters are quite deftly written. And in fact, it shows the failure of separating art & politics or trying to set up such a simplistic binary. You can't. These are deeply connected spheres. Was this what this dense book was trying to do? It certainly made me think about these things. ( )