Catherine Chung

I feel like I should like this more than I should. It was good. It wasn't great. It wasn't horrible. I grew tired of some of the flash back stories and Korean folklore stories. I wont deny I had hoped to have things a little more tied up at the end but that's not always reality and I think she was shooting for that. Some of the story lines feel a little choppy looking back on it but didn't read that way at the time. I think that is what I mean when I said I hoped things were tied up a little better at the end. There were lines of story that I thought either would be explored further or didn't make sense as to why they were really there. All said, I'd try her next book when it comes out.… (more)

Catherine Chung's The Tenth Muse is a rare example of a bestseller that I liked and one that transcends its clichéd back-of-a-female cover design.

The novel features an American mathematician who, during the era of the Vietnam War, goes to Bonn in Germany to take up post graduate opportunities. She has two good reasons for doing this: she needs to leave behind her lover and PhD supervisor Peter and the 'help' he gives her with her thesis... and she needs to try and sort out her identity.

She is Asian American, but as it turns out, her parents are not the people who raised her. Hers is a complex personal history because even had it been available then, she couldn't buy a subscription to Ancestry and discover a whole genealogy. Like many who are orphaned by war, she cannot trace even her parents, much less a family history with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

The setting in the Vietnam era allows Chung to go back in time to when people fled WW2 Germany or 'disappeared' to become untraceable, and also, via escape routes through to Shanghai, to include events in the Pacific War as well. Refugees took this route after western nations closed the door to people fleeing the Nazis.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/18/the-tenth-muse-2019-by-catherine-chung/… (more)

I found this book extremely well-written, but I never really connected with it except on a very superficial level. Janie, the narrator, was very sympathetic but not very empathetic. She was very... flat. Her emotions and motivations never shone through the story. Hannah, her sister, was this great mysterious void, but once she showed up in the plot again shrank into the background.

Throughout the book, I wanted more. More emotion, more background, more explanation, more exposition. For a first person narrative, I didn't find out too much about Janie as a person, especially since this is a coming of age story of sorts, despite Janie already being an adult. She had allowed herself to be subsumed by her parents' expectations for her, and in the story she slowly begins to exert her own own authority over her life. At the same time, Hannah had the opposite journey where she had completely renounced her parents and then started coming back to them.

This was a theme that I wish had been explored more, rather than the soap opera reasons for the two sisters to pull away from each other and from their parents (physically for one, and emotionally for the other). Instead, the story focused on Janie's relationship with her father in a meandering and not always satisfying fashion.

Review copy courtesy of the publisher via LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program… (more)