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Loading... A Gesture Life: A Novelby Chang-rae Lee
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I felt like I hadn't properly understood it, as if i should read it again. Superficially straightforward though. The detached writing style I normally hate about American writing is innate to the subject. Not simple and enjoyable like Native Speaker, and not genre either. Apart from sending everyone to hospital at the end, very beliveable, and understandable: honest. Underrated writer. (  )maiamaia | Apr 24, 2009 |   I love this author. Great story. (  )stellaphant | Mar 7, 2009 | Quiet, beautiful book that sneaks up on you. Beautiful language, very deft creation of a sense of place. (  )bfolds | Oct 15, 2008 | Even though I loved this book, it took me awhile to think of what to put in a review of it. You see, nothing much happens in the present time of the story. We meet the narrator of the story, an old man of Japanese-Korean origin, living his daily life as an old aged pensioner, in a small town in the USA, recalling his life. A perfectly adapted immigrant, unremarkable in a way. His story however, is remarkable. Born as a Korean, he was raised by Japanese fosterparents and in boarding schools. He joined the Japanese army in World War II as a medical officer, lived through the horrors of the war, encountered love in the most dramatic circumstances possible. After the war he immigrated to America, started his own medical supply shop, adopted a Korean orphan girl, who however never loved him or needed him. It's about a man who has always remained at a distance to life, an observer, unable to get attached, to get close to people, to express his love in a way that other people would understand. It's about loneliness, and a very sad story, even if there are some positive developments in the present time of the story. I loved this book for two reasons. One being the exceptional writing, the choice of words, the expressions, the way pictures are drawn by words without the exaggerated use of adjectives. It's a sober style of writing, yet at the same time very vivid. The second reason is the atmosphere of sadness, melancholia and regret, which I experienced as touching and at some points even recognizable. (So thanks, Maykasahara, for recommending this book to me!) (  )Tinwara | Jun 22, 2008 | 3317. A Gesture Life, by Chang-rae Lee (read June 3, 2000) I am influenced at times by a book board I follow, and the much discussion thereon last winter of this book led me to put it on my list of books to read and when I saw it at the library I read it. It starts out very well and caught my interest. The writing is usually appealing, but that the book had much important to say to me I cannot say. When I was finished I had no upbeat feeling about the book. My final assessment to myself said: Modern fiction usually has a certain obscure pointlessness about it, and the war scenes are dramatic, but do not make this a great book. (  )Schmerguls | Nov 29, 2007 | 0.058 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com (ISBN 0965435628, Paperback)Never judge a book by its cover--or, for that matter, by its name. Otherwise you might overlook A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee's fine if awkwardly entitled follow-up to Native Speaker. As he did in his debut, the author explores the dilemma of being an outsider--and the corrupt, heartbreaking bargains an outsider will make to adapt to his surroundings. The protagonist, Franklin Hata, has actually spent his whole life donning one variety or another of existential camouflage. First, as a native-born Korean, he bends over backwards to fit into Japanese culture, circa 1944. Then he attempts a similar bit of environmental adaptation in postwar America--more specifically, in the slumbering New York suburb of Bedley Run. But in neither case does he quite succeed, which gives the novel its peculiar, faltering sense of tragedy."There is something exemplary to the sensation of near perfect lightness," confesses this resident alien, "of being in a place and not being there, which seems of course a chronic condition of my life but then, too, its everyday unction, the trouble finding a remedy but not quite a cure, so that the problem naturally proliferates until it has become you through and through. Such is the cast of my belonging, molding to whatever is at hand." A Gesture Life presents this chronic condition in two different time frames. In one, delivered via flashback, Hata is a medical officer in Japan's Imperial Army. Posted to a tiny installation in rural Burma, he's ordered to oversee a fresh detachment of Korean "comfort women"--i.e., victims of institutionalized gang rape. At first he maintains his professional distance, not to mention his erotic appetite: "It was the notion of what lay beneath the crumpled cotton of their poor clothes that shook me like an air-raid siren." But soon enough he's drawn into a relationship with one of the women, whose bloody and horrific denouement leaves a permanent mark on the "unblissed detachment" of his existence. The present-tense, American half of the story revolves around Hata's life in Bedley Run, where he adopts, alienates, and finally forms a shaky rapport with his daughter, Sunny. We might expect this sort of material to pale in comparison with his wartime trauma. But oddly enough, Hata's suburban melancholia is much more compelling--and the gradual disclosure of his past, which is supposed to ratchet up the tension, seems too crude a mechanism for a writer of Lee's superlative talents. (His truest tutelary spirit, in fact, might be John Cheever, who gets an explicit nod at one point.) None of this is to dismiss A Gesture Life, whose dual narratives are written with a rare, unhurried elegance. And if Lee's splice job lacks the absolute adhesion we expect from a great work of art, he nonetheless pulls off a remarkable, moving feat: he puts us inside the skin of a man who, "if he could choose, might always go silent and unseen." --James Marcus (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:51 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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