Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Author: Susan Jane Gilman
- Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
- Release Date: March 2009
- ISBN-10: 0446578924
- ISBN-13: 9780446578929
- List Price: $23.99
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryAmazon Best of the Month, March 2009: While this latest memoir from Susan Jane Gilman (former Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress) appears to be a saucy account of international sexcapades, it quickly reveals its whip-smarts, sucking you into a story that brilliantly captures the "ecstatic terror" of gleefully leaping from your comfort zone--and finding yourself in freefall. It's 1986, and newly minted ivy league grads Susy and her friend Claire have never left the U.S. when (inspired by a "Pancakes of Many Nations" promotion during a drunken night at IHOP) they hatch a plan to circle the world, starting in China, which has just opened to tourists. From the moment of arrival, they're out of their depth, perpetually hungry, foolish, and paranoid from relentless observation. Claire, who carries the complete works of Nietzsche "like a Gideon Bible," seems more capable than Susy until encounters with military police, hallucinatory fevers, and a frantic escape from a squalid hospital expose cracks in her psyche that utterly derail their plans. Rich with insight, dead-on dialogue, and canny characterization, Gilman's personal tale nails that cataclysmic collision of idealism and reality that so often characterizes young adulthood. Be prepared to wolf down the final hundred pages in one sitting. --Mari Malcolm |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
I knew women like this
Rating:
I graduated from Barnard in 1981 and I knew women like this. A little too much money and a bit to little experience it seemed easier for the trust fund set to get themselves into serious trouble, than the rest of us. Still, there was something to envy in the idea that adventure is a birthright. This book is hard to read in parts, but the beginning is all possibility. It is a look into another life, both for the women involved and into another culture and finally how they clash.
China didn't really deserve this
Rating:
There have been other books about traveling with a mental case -- Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" is perhaps the most famous -- but few have been so relentlessly grim as "Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven."
The title, to get that out of the way, is catchy but has almost nothing to do with the book, which is the tale of two fresh Brown graduates who decide in 1986 to backpack around the world, starting with China, then only recently open to such gallivanting. I confess, I picked up the book because I wondered just how stupid two Ivy League girls could be. Plenty, as expected, but there are more layers in this book than I expected.
One in particular raises "Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven" out of the common ruck of travelogues. Not too often in travel literature (aside from the explicitly political) does the author face and confess to a moral dilemma. It happens here, and it turns the book into an experience worth contemplating, which otherwise it would not be.
If it hadn't been for that and for the crisis of madness that overtook Gilman's travel companion, called Claire, this would have been a tedious tale.
The two girls had vague notions of experiencing the rest of the world, but since they didn't speak Chinese, their experience of China was trivial. Mostly they interacted with other backpackers, portrayed as a shallow and giddy bunch of layabouts that you wouldn't bother to know back home.
This knocking about and being continually repulsed by the living standards of the Chinese could, and does, get old pretty quick, and combined with occasional passages of too-purple prose made reading "Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven" a chore for the first 150 pages. The confession that "each day . . . we grew more acutely aware of just how coddled we'd been all our lives and just how foolish we were" was no surprise. I could have guessed as much before opening the covers.
Things improve -- that is, they go downhill catastrophically for the participants -- thereafter.
With the perspective of nearly 25 years, Gilman has some thoughtful things to say about her experience and about the Chinese, to the extent she learned much about them. "Everything I'd known up to that point about China was basically, a gross cultural stereotype." By the end of the book, she comes away with a different stereotype, equally at odds with reality, or so it appears.
The Chinese put up with a lot. Whenever I walk the aisles of a garden store and see the ranks of ceramic or fiberglass garden gnomes from China, I wonder what the former peasants who have migrated to the dark, satanic mills of the Pearl River Valley or Shanghai imagine to be the cultural characteristics of people who need so many garden gnomes. The few Chinese who encountered Susan and Claire couldn't have been much enlightened in that respect.
No Bowl of Flawless Delight Paradise Dog Soup
Rating:
"Undress me in the Temple of Heaven", a travel memoir about two Brown grads in the People's Republic of China in the eighties, seems an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of travel memoir "Eat, Pray, Love", by Elizabeth Gilbert. Gilbert was such an original fruitcake that her first person, utterly self-absorbed memoir was a charming wander across the map. Unfortunately, Gilman's book is not the sexy, fun romp that the title seems to promise. Yes, she finally gets undressed, but the Temple of Heaven ain't what it used to be. This is a dated, sarcastic tale of an ill-advised trip to China with the usual self congratulatory, Liberal stereotypes: big boobed, ethnic, free love, New York liberal, versus the uptight, rich, thin, blond Republican. Guess who wins. The so called irreverence is that Gilman departs far enough from the party line to admit that Communist China is no bowl of Flawless Delight Paradise Dog soup. I found this book a strange, headache inducing journey, where the girls are always in excruciatingly unpleasant circumstances but manage to survive--no mean feat in the vicious, crude, Orwellian communist bureaucracy of the People's Republic. Gilman has a few honest moments about youth, but not enough and not nearly honest enough.
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven
Rating:
I enjoyed Undress Me in The Temple of heaven -- I found it was a fascinating non-fiction book about China both in 1985 and recently!!
I have bought 3 copies and given two away -- so far everyone is enoying it immensely!!
Hindered by unlikable characters and the author's reading of the audio
Rating:
Right after their Brown University graduation in 1986, author Susan Jane Gilman and her friend Claire Van Houten embark on an ambitious venture: backpacking around the world. Of course, after studying a placemat at the International House of Pancakes, they decide to begin in Communist China, only ten days after outsiders have been allowed to enter. Thus begins Gilman's memoir of the journey, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.
After deplaning in Hong Kong, Gilman gets a raging nosebleed, and only then do they realize they've packed everything but tissues -- including a year's supply of tampons, a Lonely Planet guide, and the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche (a little light reading on the trail is always good). And that's only the beginning of a truly misguided attempt at life-expansion that takes them through most of China, though they have increasing difficulty with communication as they find their Mandarin phrasebook practically useless when faced with the many different regional dialects.
The strangeness only escalates when, once they're settled, with little social contact to speak of, Claire suddenly decides to repeatedly go off by herself, doing "business," making "contacts," etc. and making less and less sense all the time. What happens later acts as the climax of this globe-trotting story and illustrates the everpresent bureaucracy of a country under Communist rule.
Gilman does her best to tell only the more entertaining parts of the story -- oddly enough, the title references an event that didn't actually happen -- but it's hard to stay interested in a pair of women who are so blatantly despicable. Unlikable protagonists are not the way to go with a book intended for a wide audience, though Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven is still bound to be a huge hit with reading groups. The various people that Susan and Claire meet offer money, food, help, and advice, and yet are more often than not left without even a thank you.
Nevertheless, the seemingly unending procession of one obstacle after another makes it equally difficult to stop reading/listening. And while not exactly likable, both women display a certain guileless charm: a complete lack of worldliness that makes it easy to step into their shoes and wonder what you would do in the same situation (or give thanks that you aren't).
The audiobook of Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven (read by the author) includes an interview with Gilman on the last disc, where she brings the listener up to date with her life and contact with the characters. Perhaps the time spent confirming events and writing them down overexposed her to the text and characters, but she sounds rather bored by the whole venture.
One would think that having Gilman read her own book would add an extra layer to the experience, but it actually detracts somewhat and emphasizes the fact that she is trying to write above her ability. She mispronounces numerous words, including "Charybdis," "depravity," "normalcy," and the verb form of "frequent" while using questionable phrases like "gouged with graffiti," and these seeming mistakes continually took me out of the story. (The moral: one so proud of her alma mater to repeatedly brag about it in the text should choose words she has mastered.)
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