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In this stunning novel, Darin Strauss combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history's most famous twins. Born in Siam in 1811—on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River—Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world's stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage.
Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss's narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century's most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Jose Augusto Freitas Sob
reviewed Chang and Eng on January 19, 2010
Chang and Eng
One evening while I was reading--and complaining about--Chang and Eng, my husband asked, "How can you write a bad book about conjoined twins who fathered 21 children between them?" It's a miracle, but Darin Strauss did it. The book was pretty boring due to Strauss's odd structural and stylistic choices. Why go back and forth between the twins' childhood and thier married life? Sometimes shifts like that add intreague to a book, but here it was pointless. Midway through the book I fixed this problem for myself by skipping chapters and going back to them in order to put the story in chronological order for myself. And why tell it all from Eng's point of view? One of the most interesting things about the story was imagining what it would be like to live permanently attached to another person. Would you like it? Would you not? Would you crave or fear separation? Maybe the two of you, although conjoined, do not share the same opinion. Eng says this is the case for him and his brother, but if Strauss felt compelled to go back and forth chapter to chapter, switching narrators so we could hear Chang's voice, too, could have been more effective than the time shifting. In spite of my complaints, I'm glad to have learned about Chang and Eng, North Carolina residents whom I hadn't heard about before, and it made for a fun book club discussion!
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Add Chang and Eng, In this stunning novel, Darin Strauss combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history's most famous twins. Born in Siam in 1811—on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River—Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities befor, Chang and Eng to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
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Add Chang and Eng, In this stunning novel, Darin Strauss combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history's most famous twins. Born in Siam in 1811—on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River—Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities befor, Chang and Eng to your collection on WonderClub |