Put simply, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a stunning novel masquerading as a parody of a canned business self-help book. With twelve chapters spanning the unnamed main characters ~80 year life, the book is loaded with humor, meaning, and more than a small amount of tear-jerking emotion.
The trite early chapters (with titles like "Don't Fall In Love" and "Move to the City") slowly deepen in complexity, eventually transforming from the unabashed chronicle of a rising business titan into a touching reflection on aging, love, and finding meaning in life. It was a novel that made me cry, and its generic voice (none of the characters have names, for example) only serves to heighten the universal resonance of the story that unfolds.
To get a sense for the prose, I think that this quote is just so poignant, funny, and indicative of the entire novel: "And where moneymaking is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out."
Going into the novel, I really didn't know what to expect, but whatever my expectations, they were unquestionably surpassed. This is a book that I will likely return to later in life and experience in a totally new way as my youth fades and I, like the protagonist, become old.
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