The Butcher's Wife

A 1930s Shanghai case of a woman who murdered her husband inspired Li Ang to write this deep and harrowing novel that was an outrageous literary sensation. In a small coastal Taiwanese town, the pig butcher's brutality towards his new young wife knows no bounds. She becomes scorned by her neighbors who condemn her for screaming aloud. Lin Shin, isolated, despairing, is finally driven to madness and kills him with his own meat cleaver. ""May be the most frightening book ever written about women oppressed by men""--Los Angeles Times.

This brutally realistic and groundbreaking novella was both acclaimed and excoriated when first published in Taiwan in 1983. The author, born in Taiwan and educated in America, has taken a sensational murder case of the 1930s and set it in her native town. Trapped in marriage to a vicious husband by a superstitious, male-dominated society, Lin Shi is slowly driven to madness and murder. That she killed her husband to escape physical and sexual abuse was unimaginable; a Chinese wife who kills her husband has always been presumed to have a lover, and Lin Shi is punished accordingly. This compelling portrait of a world where poverty erodes all but the most primeval instincts transcends feminism to become a great human tragedy. Unforgettable, and highly recommended. Shelley Cox, Special Collections, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.