{"product_id":"fantan-isbn-9781400096268","title":"Fan-Tan","description":"\u003ci\u003eFan-Tan\u003c\/i\u003e is a hugely entertaining, swashbuckling romp, from one of the greatest actors of our time: Marlon Brando. The story of an eccentric early-twentieth-century pirate who sets out on the high seas from the Philippines to Shanghai, \u003ci\u003eFan-Tan\u003c\/i\u003e follows the exploits of  Anatole “Annie” Doultry, a larger-than-life character that Brando could have easily inhabited himself. When Annie saves the life of a Chinese prisoner in a Hong Kong prison, he’s led to the mysterious and seductive Madame Lai Choi San—one of the most notorious gangsters in Asia—and here the true adventures begin.Years in the making with Brando’s longtime collaborator, screenwriter and director Donald Cammell, \u003ci\u003eFan-Tan\u003c\/i\u003e is a rollicking, delectable tale—and the last surprise from an ever-surprising legend.“\u003ci\u003eFan-Tan\u003c\/i\u003e is the kind of high-seas extravaganza nobody writes anymore . . . . A ripping yarn, an old-fashioned potboiler with something for everyone.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“An exceedingly strange, high-stepping, low-stooping tale.” –\u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World \u003c\/i\u003e“\u003ci\u003eFan-Tan\u003c\/i\u003e is indeed an outrageous sea-story, with babes and pirates, drink and sex. It has an undeniable charm. . . . Students of film, lovers of Brando, or those with a hankering for another tale of avarice and deceit on the high seas will want to have a look.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Houston Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003eMarlon Brando appeared in more than forty films, including \u003ci\u003eThe Wild One, A Streetcar Named Desire, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eApocalypse Now,\u003c\/i\u003e and won Academy Awards for his performances in \u003ci\u003eOn the Waterfront\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Godfather\u003c\/i\u003e. His autobiography, \u003ci\u003eSongs My Mother Taught Me, \u003c\/i\u003ewas published in 1994.Donald Cammell, writer, actor, producer, and director, was best known for his films \u003ci\u003ePerformance\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDemon Seed,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eWild Side\u003c\/i\u003e.The Prison\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Under a black cloud, the prison. And within the prison, a bright rebel.  The walls were extremely high, and although this was not possible, they  appeared to lean inward yet also to bulge outward, and they were topped  with a luminous frosting of broken glass. Seen from the heights of the  modest hill named Victoria Peak—from the summer residence of the governor  of the Crown Colony of Hong Kong—the prison must have looked very fine.  “If the sun were ever to shine,” said Annie to the Portuguee, “the glass  would probably glitter. It would look like a necklace of diamonds,  Lorenzo. Or a big margarita, in a square cup.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The sun had not shone since November. This was March 2nd, “In the year of  Their Lord” (Annie’s words again) 1927. The vast cloud, several hundreds  of miles in diameter and near as thick, squatted upon the unprepossessing  island and pissed upon its prison. Annie Doultry (named Anatole for  Monsieur France, the novelist) was negotiating the one hundred and  eightieth day of a six-month stretch. Born in Edinburgh in the year 1876,  he looked his age, every passing minute of it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    His father had been a typesetter, a romantically inclined Scotsman whose  hands played with words, a man who loved puns and tragedy, King Lear and  Edward Lear. His mother was an unusual woman, lovely and liked, but not  quite respectable. She was a MacPherson, but she had a flighty side. She  had had lovers, the way some families have pets. Though raised in logic,  common sense, and strict economy, once in a while she took absurd  gambles—for one, her husband. Later the Doultrys emigrated to Seattle, the  boy and the paternal grandmother in tow like many a Midlothian family in  those days (when at least there was somewhere to emigrate to). The whole  story was vague, though, and Annie was not much given to reflection upon  his childhood. His memory was a mess, as full of giant holes as an old  sock. Scotland was an accent he loved.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the other hand, he thought a lot about the future. “That is one of my  characteristics, Lorenzo,” he said firmly to the bum of a Portuguee who  occupied the bunk above, all aswamp in his own noisome reflections. Annie  spoke out like that as a matter of principle, as a way of resisting the  danger of thinking silently about one’s own thoughts. That could lead to  more thinking and so forth in a potentially hazardous spiral of  regressions, the sort of thing one had to be careful of in Victoria Gaol.  Men went mad there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “If you think like a prisoner,” said Lorenzo, “you are a prisoner for  life.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Not me,” said Annie Doultry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “But you are here,” said the Portuguee—and it was undeniable. The loose  Annie, liberty-loving, unpredictable, spontaneous, was as confined as  anyone else in the prison.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Soon you be old, man,” mocked Lorenzo. “People grow old fast here.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That warning sank in. It helped explain Annie’s thoughtful look. Once in  prison was once too often. Annie Doultry had had little time to ask  himself, “Where are you in life? Are you going to be a jailbird or are you  going to be your own man?” He had taken that latter hope for granted, but  he was too old to be lingering. You could say that it was prison that  turned him into a full-blooded fatalist—and made him dangerous.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The grown man himself had a nose bent a little to the left. This is what  he had written in pencil under March 1, his yesterday: “They say follow  your nose. If I followed mine I guess I would be a Bolshie. But mine is a  nose that knows who is boss.” There, his own words hint at it: at a level  above mere punnery the nose stood upon its battered cartilage as a sort of  memorial to the mockery of the name that might have graced a fair highland  woman. “Annie Doultry, rhymes with ‘poultry,’ ” he repeated a number of  times, testing his earplugs of candle wax as he screwed them in. Nothing  wrong with the ears, their lobes pendulous in the style that indicated  wisdom according to the Chinese, but the main organs compactly fitted  beneath the hinges of a lantern jaw notorious for its insensitivity. “A  face to sink a thousand ships,” said Annie sonorously, as a final trial,  and with the satisfaction of one who could no longer hear himself except  as cello notes in his own bones.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To turn from the inner life of the man to his three-dimensional situation:  the lower bunk of a cell in D block, seven feet by five with the usual  grim appurtenances, shit pail and ignoble window, glassless but thickly  barred, its sill over five feet from the concrete floor, making it  fiendishly difficult for a Chinese to see out. Not so hard for Annie  Doultry, however, for he was a large man and terribly thick of thew.  Thick-chested, thick thumbs and eyebrows, thick tendons of the wrist and  below the kneecap and at the insertion of the hamstring, a valuable asset  for a violent man a little past the years of youthful resilience when  being thrown out of bars and down companion ladders were just laughable  excursions. Thick-bearded he was, too. They had tried to make him shave it  off, but he had fought a moral battle with them, from barber to chief  warder to the governor himself—and won it. So they had taken his hair but  left him his beard to play with. Subsequently each hair had grown prouder,  though admittedly grayer. It was an unusual gray, with the cuprite tinge  that bronze develops when it takes what the imperial metal workers called  the water patina.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Annie had often looked at himself in his mirror—before he lost it. It was  a metal mirror, not of great antiquity. It was stainless   steel, with a hole to hang it from, four inches square and probably   Pittsburgh-made, for trading with Polynesian natives. The mirror was both  kind and perceptive, like a rare friend. It stressed equally the deceptive  youth and petulance of Doultry’s mouth and the inexpressible, faltering  beauty of his eyes. Faltering, because they never quite looked back at  themselves, in that or any other mirror. The eyes were guarded because he  did not wish them to expose him in any way. Beautiful, by way of his  mother presumably, for his father was an ugly fellow; or perhaps just by  way of contrast with the rustic ruin of the nose.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    His hair was not so thick, of course, and it was cropped repulsively short  back and sides. This style was all the rage in the prison, for it denied  living space to the poor overcrowded lice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The next thing was to get his socks in his hands in the correct manner.  The heels should fit one in t’other, hand heel in sock heel; but the  latter were giant vacuities, and the light was poor. The task had to be  done. Nothing else guarded against the roaches.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Portuguee was moaning, which meant that he was asleep. No earplug was  proof against that sound. “He is in the fearful presence of a Jesuitical  dream,” said Annie softly. He wished he could write this down in his  schoolbook, but the socks made it impossible. “Or perhaps he is praying.”  Damnation was what the man wished to avoid at all costs; he had told Annie  so. But what made his moans all the more impressive was their coincidental  harmonic precision with a Chinese type of moan, straight from the throat  in E-flat and out through a mouth agape and then the open window of the  hospital ward. This pit of suffering was on the ground floor of A block,  just across the alley. The one who moaned had been flogged two or three  days ago; his wounds were ulcerating and so on. But it must be made clear  that the problem for Annie was not emotional or spiritual: it was a  sleeping problem, for the buildings were all crammed together and the  acoustics were excellent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Annie lay back with the socks on his hands. On the great hairy pampas of  his chest stood a ravaged tea mug, its blue enamel all mottled with dark  perfusions like aging internal bruises promising worse to come. Yet Annie  treasured it, for it was his one remaining possession inside this tomb of  a prison. The other things—the lighter without a flint, the metal mirror,  the brass buckle with the camel’s head—he had gambled away at the roach  races. Besides, Annie liked his tea, and Corporal Strachan (Ret.), chief  warder of D block, would slip him an extra in this mug, Annie’s own. Now,  however, it was empty as an unrewarded sin. On either side of it lay his  big bunched mitts, gray as stone, manos de piedra indeed, whose knuckles  were protuberant but the fingers astonishingly delicate considering what  they had been through—no pun intended.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He remained still. Around his tea mug, his chest was decorated with dried  pellets of sorghum (a sort of mealy stuff) flavored with ginger. This was  a taste much favored by cockroaches. His broad belly carried a trail of  these pellets past his navel via the folds of his filthy canvas pants down  to his bare feet. The big toes rested with a look of weary dignity on the  rusted bedstead. Along it was laid an enticing line of roach bait, like  the fuse to a keg of TNT.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Annie Doultry was lying in wait for his prey with all the punctilious preparation of a hunter of tigers, or of leopards, using his own  person in lieu of the tethered goat. For this was the essential feature of  his plan: his personal attractiveness to the animals in question. If there  is one dish a Chinese roach prefers to sorghum and ginger, it   is the dried skin of a whitee’s feet. They would not dream of devouring  the living epidermis, they were not looking for trouble, but they favored  calluses as an epicurean rabbi does smoked herring. To hold it against  them—the roaches, that is—would be rank prejudice; but the fact was that a  vulnerable foot was denuded of its natural protection. Feet became little  engines of sensitivity. In Annie’s case it was worse, for the roaches  nibbled his fingers too throughout the torpid watches of the night—oh, how  delicately they chomped away at the husks of his fingertips! Never did  they wake him, and circumspection was their motto. No doubt the fearful  size of the man gave them pause. “Do not wake him,” they whispered one to  another as they satisfied their desire. Hence the socks on his hands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In a mood of stillness, Annie Doultry waited. The light became dimmer, the  black cloud thickening with the approaching night. Under the black cloud,  the prison.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Doultry’s cell was no different in shape or size from the other three  hundred and twelve. But in status it was one of a select few, like an  ancient and appalling Russian railway carriage with First Class all in  gold letters on its side. The top-floor view included the top strata of  Victoria Peak and the governor’s summer residence, its Union Jack weighted  in the moist atmosphere like a proud dishcloth. The grub was better  too—pork twice a week, which was twice as much pork as the others got, the  others being Chinese, a smaller race and less needful of meat, according  to colonial doctrine. (And who will say they were wrong? Too much pork  rots the colon’s underwear and the upholstery of the beating heart.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The top floor of D block was called the E section, which need not confuse  the student if he remembers that the E stood for Europe, or European. The  exalted E loomed on brooding signs and likewise on Annie Doultry’s  institutional garments, stenciled on the canvas in blood-clot red above  the broad arrow. The arrow pointed at the letter with pride or with  accusation, depending on how you looked at it. In Annie’s case it was also  with indignation, for he was an American, a true-blue American since the  age of five or thereabouts (though in his heart’s heart he knew he was  ever a Celt from the land of mists, and a wanderer).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Doultry was not the first Yank to wear the big E. As the superintendent  had patiently explained to him, the E referred not to geography but to  race, and in the view of the prison service a white   or whitish American was indisputably an E. There were five-  hundred-odd A’s and fourteen E’s in residence in March of ’27, including  remand prisoners awaiting trial. This proportional representation was  surprisingly close to that of the colony as a whole. This again could be  regarded as praiseworthy, pointing at the proud blindness of British  justice, or as shameful, for obvious reasons.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301968892133,"sku":"NP9781400096268","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400096268.jpg?v=1767726706","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/fantan-isbn-9781400096268","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}