This book is presented as an intertextual study, and intertextuality -- the reading of one text in the light of another one -- is also incestuous in that it involves an illicit connection between things closely related. Maxine Hong Kingston's Broken Book of Life, therefore, is no simple-minded tract, but instead something that seeks to finger its way deep into the female Chinese subconscious, energetically brushing away the neatly raked top-soil to establish the exact nature of the secret root system beneath.
This kind of investigation is in the tradition of Camille Paglia, a writer of genius and the most brilliant literary critic the US has ever produced. Far from perceiving women as the same as men in all important particulars (something Marxist feminists are keen to insist on), Paglia sees them instead as profoundly different, and much closer to savage nature than the calculating, cerebral male.
With her interests in mother goddesses and mystery religions, Sabine is a feminist with a difference. It's a mark of Hong Kingston's stature that she can absorb even this kind of darkly chthonic analysis into her capacious embrace.
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