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Summary
Summary
"Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more. . . . With On Such a Full Sea , [Chang-rae Lee] has found a new way to explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate, betraying, lonely human heart."--Andrew Sean Greer, The New York Times Book Review
"I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews, but faced with On Such a Full Sea , I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?"--Porochista Khakpour, The Los Angeles Times
From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered , a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman's legendary quest in a shocking, future America.
On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee's elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in.
In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class--descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China--find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.
In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan's journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.
Author Notes
Chang-Rae Lee was born in Korea and moved to the United States when he was a small child. He later attended Yale University and is currently a professor at the University of Oregon.
Lee became the first Korean-American novelist to be published by notable American press with his novel, Native Speaker. The novel was awarded the Heminway Foundation PEN Award. In 2014, he made The New York Times Best Seller List for his title On Such a Full Sea.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lee's (The Surrendered) latest novel is set in a dystopic future world in which the cities of Detroit and Baltimore are now facilities, called B-Mor and D-Troy by their residents, all of whom are of Asian descent. These city dwellers spend their lives in happy serfdom, working day jobs to produce goods (mostly food) for the richer Charter communities. But when Fan, an unassuming 16-year-old with a talent for diving, abandons B-Mor in search of her vanished boyfriend, Reg, the fabric of orderly B-Mor begins to fray. Lee tells the story of Fan's quest, from the facilities to the open counties (lawless places where Fan's unwavering purpose and childlike demeanor are the only things that protect her), and, finally, to a Charter called Seneca. The narrator is the collective voice of B-Mor, who often interrupts Fan's journey with digressions on the nature of legends and the impossibility of any story surviving, unaltered, the whims of the teller. It's an engrossing read, and Lee's skills as a world builder of the finest order are evident in every chapter. Late in the second half of the book, Fan is temporarily imprisoned with a group of kept girls. All of their eyes are altered to resemble those of anime characters, and they're trapped in a white dormitory, where they magic-marker their histories onto the wall. Lee's descriptions of their images-which start as truth and then careen into a fantastic blend of imagination and interpretation-are beautiful metaphors for the way stories take on lives of their own. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Lee (The Surrendered, 2010), always entrancing and delving, has taken fresh approaches to storytelling in each of his previous four novels, but he takes a truly radical leap in this wrenching yet poetic, philosophical, even mystical speculative odyssey. B-Mor is a rigorously ordered labor settlement founded in what used to be Baltimore by refugees from impossibly polluted New China. They grow stringently regulated food for the elite, who live in gated charter villages, surrounded by open counties, in which civilization has collapsed under the assaults of a pandemic and an ever-harsher climate. In a third-person plural narrative voice that perfectly embodies the brutal and wistful communities he portrays, Lee tells the mythic story of young, small, yet mighty Fan, a breath-held diver preternaturally at home among the farmed fish she tends to. When her boyfriend inexplicably disappears, Fan escapes from B-Mor to search for him, embarking on a daring, often surreal quest in a violent, blighted world. She encounters a taciturn healer bereft of all that he cherished, a troupe of backwoods acrobats, and a disturbing cloister of girls creating an intricate mural of their muffled lives. Lee brilliantly and wisely dramatizes class stratification and social disintegration, deprivation and sustenance both physical and psychic, reflecting, with rare acuity, on the evolution of legends and how, in the most hellish of circumstances, we rediscover the solace of art. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Literary best-seller Lee will reach an even larger readership with this electrifying postapocalyptic novel as he tours the country in conjunction with an all-points media and publicity drive.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
watching A talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and "On Such a Full Sea" provides all that and more. It's a wonderful addition not only to Chang-rae Lee's body of work but to the ranks of "serious" writers venturing into the realm of dystopian fantasy. Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood (in her recently concluded MaddAddam trilogy) have all tackled this genre. Doris Lessing's "Mara and Dann" is a classic, as is Anthony Burgess's "Clockwork Orange." Further back in time, one has only to think of Orwell, Huxley and Wells, even Jack London and Mary Shelley. As the author of such carefully realist fiction as "Native Speaker" and "A Gesture Life," Lee has always been preoccupied by the themes of hope and betrayal, by the tensions that arise in small lives in the midst of great social change. His marvelous new book, which imagines a future after the breakdown of our own society, takes on those concerns with his customary mastery of quiet detail - and a touch of the fantastic. There are no robots or cannibals in Lee's future. Instead, "On Such a Full Sea" takes place in an almost familiar world, one whose cities were long ago rendered unlivable by polluted air and water, forcing whole societies to relocate. This time, America's colonizers come from Asia. "Our people arrived from New China, truly ancient times," we are told. "There was very little to encounter by way of an indigenous population." The novel begins long after New China's influence has taken hold, creating a tripartite society that, after generations of success, has begun to show its age. To outline it too clearly would ruin the suspense surrounding the discovery of just how this world came to be, but suffice it to say that the upper, middle and lower classes have separated into different realms of existence, a future not impossible for today's readers to envision. Fan, the novel's 16-year-old protagonist - "not beautiful but rather distinctive in her presence" - begins her life in the middle-tier world, as a diver in the untroubled, prosperous labor settlement of B-Mor. A conservative, homogeneous place, B-Mor offers an array of simple comforts: "We're no longer fit for any harsher brand of life." Daily activity goes according to a strict plan, and even Fan's older brother's promotion out of the community leaves no sign of disturbance. Then one day her lover, Reg, disappears - with no explanation, leaving no trace. This unravels poor Fan so swiftly that she does the unthinkable: She leaves the guarded enclave of B-Mor for the wilds of the surrounding "counties," desperately searching for Reg. "The funny thing about the tale of Fan," we are told, "is that much of what happened to her happened to her." She's just a teenager, after all; her story is not that of Katniss "catching fire" but simply that of "a girl with a love who was lost," moving among various strata of society according to the kindness or venality of those who cross her path. The first one to find her, wounded on a county road, is a bearded older man named Quig, who brings her back to the "Smokes," where his compound provides medical help to the hopeless and the impoverished. Though ramshackle, the world of the "county" is not that of Thunderdome; it's simply what our own poor, rural areas would become if the government turned its back forever. We soon learn that Quig is not originally from the counties, and the story of his fall from grace is a devastating reminder of how, in an ungoverned world, the fortunes of even the greatest can hang by a thread. From the counties, Fan eventually finds her way to the highest world - the rarefied realm of the Charters, where she hopes she might be reunited with her brother and Reg - but not before she experiences the savagery of people who have nothing to lose. And Lee isn't just talking about the impoverished. Lee's most interesting choice is his narrator, the collective "we" of the B-Mor community, which changes the novel from an adventure story into a myth in the midst of creation: "The more we follow the turns of her journey, the more we realize that she is not quite the champion we would normally sing; she is not the heroine who wields the great sword. ... She is one of the ranks, this perfectly ordinary, exquisitely tiny person in whom we will reside, via both living and dreaming." For there is trouble in B-Mor. This fishing compound, with its regimented social codes, finds itself falling apart after Fan's departure: The rich Charters are buying fewer fish; the community's facilities are being defaced with litter and rebellious graffiti; angry crowds are gathering; and a disease known as "C-illness" imperils everyone. For the people of B-Mor, Fan's story becomes a search for a savior: "Within her was the one promise that could deliver us, the seed of all our futures." And so the people of B-Mor tell her story to themselves, as solace and as explanation. But they aren't the only ones who see salvation, and profit, in Fan. THE PRICE FOR this narrative choice is that Lee's heroine remains a bit of a cipher, and some later sections of the novel suffer from longueurs as a result. But the payoff is a remarkable elasticity, allowing Lee to move from an omniscient bird's-eye view to an intimate exploration of inner lives to wholly convincing fantasy. The communal voice is particularly riveting when Fan is in danger - "And we can barely recount what was about to happen next..." - adding a creeping horror to the storytelling. It's proof of Lee's virtuosity that he can pull off such a feat without allowing his audience to feel anything but narrative drive. A reader hoping for weird mutants and wild conflagrations has picked up the wrong book; Lee's influence is more Philip Roth than Philip K. Dick. Although he peppers "On Such a Full Sea" with some genre pleasures - suspiciously friendly (and hungry) strangers; the decadent rich - Fan's journey through a mysterious future turns out to be a timeless exploration of the human condition. Perfection leads to stagnation, success precludes passion, desperation births cruelty, and within each character we sense desire trying to claw its way out. Yet for all except "ordinary" Fan, there is no way out. In a scene that could fit easily into his previous novels, Lee sets the members of a love triangle, a woman and two men, in a Charter swimming pool. As the men begin their laps, a wordless battle takes place that ends in blood but not in violence. "All she knew," we are told, as an onlooker watches the shamed loser, "was that he was staring at her with the deadest eyes." Scenes like these show where Lee's interests truly lie. With "On Such a Full Sea," he has found a new way to explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate, betraying, lonely human heart. Chang-rae Lee's dystopian fiction owes more to Philip Roth than Philip K. Dick. ANDREW SEAN GREER'S latest novel, "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells," was published in June.
Guardian Review
Dystopia is by its nature a dreary, inhospitable country. To its early explorers it held all the excitement of discovery, and that made their descriptions fresh and powerful - EM Forster's "The Machine Stops", Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But for the last 30 years or more, Dystopia has been a major tourist attraction. Everybody goes there and writes a book about it. And the books tend to be alike, because the terrain is limited and its nature is monotonous. The most familiar view of it is a wild landscape, more or less catastrophically ruined or neglected, in which human settlements exist widely separated from each other and cut off from nature, other species, sometimes even the outer atmosphere. These enclaves - underground or in domes or behind walls - are human hives, controlled by government and supporting a regimented, sheltered, safe, highly unnatural, often luxurious, "utopian" lifestyle. Those inside the enclaves consider those living outside them to be primitive, lawless and dangerous, which they are, though they also often hold the promise of freedom. So Dystopia has a hero: an insider who goes outside. Chang-rae Lee's guidebook to the country is, as one would expect from a professor of creative writing, full of ingenious variations on predictable themes, and written with such complex subtlety of point of view as to give it at least the appearance of a new understanding of the place. It follows the usual inside/outside pattern. A vague entity called "the directorate" maintains two kinds of enclave: crowded and industrious worker-class colonies produce the necessities for upper-class colonies called Charters, where people live in lavish and competitive luxury. Outside these somehow protected zones is anarchic wilderness, called "the counties". The narrator-guide is a first-person-plural voice that represents and speaks for the people of B-Mor (Baltimore), a colony of Asian-ancestry workers who grow food for the Charters. This "we" voice is also inexplicably able to know and relate the journey and the emotions of the hero who goes outside. A good many things in the novel were inexplicable to me, such as how and when North America came to be like this, what happened to nation and religion, how raw materials are produced and how, without trains or good highways, they manage to have coffee, petrol, electronic devices, food in plastic pouches, neoprene suits, plastic throwaway dishes and implements - unsustainably hi-tech luxuries that we in 2014 enjoy thanks to our immense global network of industrial production. In a broken, sporadic civilisation, where does all this stuff come from? Neglect of such literal, rational questions in imaginative fiction is often excused, even legitimised, as literary licence. Because the author is known as a literary writer, he will probably be granted the licence he takes. But social science fiction is granted no such irresponsibility, and a novel about a future society under intense political control is social science fiction. Like Cormac McCarthy and others, Lee uses essential elements of a serious genre irresponsibly, superficially. As a result, his imagined world carries little weight of reality. The whole system is too self-contradictory to serve as warning or satire, even if towards the end of the book the narrator begins to suspect its insubstantiality. The hero is a young woman named Fan, pregnant by a young man named Reg. Uniquely immune to the one scourge of the Charters, the worker colonies and the counties alike - a group of fatal diseases known as C - Reg is taken away by the Charters so they can study him and find the secret of his immunity. Fan leaves her home colony and sets out alone to find Reg, with no idea where he is and no plan of how to get there or how to survive in the savagely unsafe and incoherent outside world. She trusts her amazing physical prowess and her amazingly sharp wits. Maybe she just relies on being a superhero - a quality that will, indeed, get you safely through anything. Her superheroism is coloured by a tinge of saintliness ascribed to her by the elusive first-person-plural narrator - the voice of the industrious, modest, patient workers of her home hive. Perhaps she represents their virtues. I could believe in those virtues, but I could not believe in Fan. Lee's prose is suave and canny; his story flows; events are vividly described, particularly as they verge into grotesque folktale violence and exaggeration; there are pleasant contemplative moments. Readers who find anachronism and implausibility easy to swallow will enjoy the story and perhaps find in it the fresh vision, the new take on dreary old Dystopia, that I could not. Ursula K Le Guin's The Unreal and the Real will be published by Gollancz later this year. To order On Such a Full Sea for pounds 11.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Ursula K Le Guin Dystopia is by its nature a dreary, inhospitable country. To its early explorers it held all the excitement of discovery, and that made their descriptions fresh and powerful - EM Forster's "The Machine Stops", Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But for the last 30 years or more, Dystopia has been a major tourist attraction. Everybody goes there and writes a book about it. And the books tend to be alike, because the terrain is limited and its nature is monotonous. Chang-rae Lee's guidebook to the country is, as one would expect from a professor of creative writing, full of ingenious variations on predictable themes, and written with such complex subtlety of point of view as to give it at least the appearance of a new understanding of the place. It follows the usual inside/outside pattern. A vague entity called "the directorate" maintains two kinds of enclave: crowded and industrious worker-class colonies produce the necessities for upper-class colonies called Charters, where people live in lavish and competitive luxury. Outside these somehow protected zones is anarchic wilderness, called "the counties". The narrator-guide is a first-person-plural voice that represents and speaks for the people of B-Mor (Baltimore), a colony of Asian-ancestry workers who grow food for the Charters. This "we" voice is also inexplicably able to know and relate the journey and the emotions of the hero who goes outside. - Ursula K Le Guin.
Kirkus Review
A harrowing and fully imagined vision of dystopian America from Lee, who heretofore has worked in a more realist mode. Lee's oeuvre is largely made up of novels about Asians assimilating into American society (The Surrendered, 2010, etc.), and in many regards, this one is no different. Its hero is Fan, a young woman of Chinese descent who leaves her native Baltimore to find her disappeared lover, Reg. However, the near-future America she travels through is catastrophically going off the rails: The wealthy (or "Charters") live in protected communities, the lawless "counties" are highly dangerous, while those like Fan in the struggling middle live and work in highly regimented communities designed to serve the Charters' needs. (Fan worked in a fishery in Baltimore, renamed B-Mor.) Typical of dystopian literary novels, the circumstances that brought the country to this ugly pass aren't clear (though social concerns about the environment and carcinogens are high). What Lee adds to the genre is his graceful, observant writing, as well as a remarkably well-thought-out sense of how crisis stratifies society and collapses morality. As Fan travels north from B-Mor, she encounters or hears about people who are actively brokering or sacrificing human life to survive. Lee's imagination here is at once gruesome and persuasive: A family of circus-type performers who kill people and feed them to their dogs, a cloistered Charter housewife with a group of adopted children who are never allowed to leave their rooms, a doctor who accepts poor patients only to the extent they're willing to prostitute themselves to him. The potency and strangeness of these characters never diminish the sense that Lee has written an allegory of our current predicaments, and the narration, written in the collective voice of B-Mor, gives the novel the tone of a timeless and cautionary fable. Welcome and surprising proof that there's plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Two hundred years in the future, America is divided into three kinds of settlements. The "Charters" offer secure, gated privilege. The "open counties" are dangerous and lawless. "Facilities" are former cities where workers live and manufacture goods and produce food. Fan is a young woman who works on a fish farm in the former Baltimore, now known as B-more. She is descended from Chinese immigrants but breaks rank with her ethnic clan, falls in love with Reg, and becomes pregnant. When Reg disappears (likely taken by the Charters to be the subject of medical experimentation), Fan sets out to find him. Lee (The Surrendered) keeps his imagined world plausible, though the story, told by a faceless resident of B-more, is more bleak than happy. B.D. Wong's narration is perfect for the B-morean: flat without a hint of irony and a slight Asian accent. VERDICT Fans of dystopian fiction will enjoy this offering. ["That versatility ensures Sea equal appreciation among readers who enjoy a heart-thumping adventure and doctoral students in search of a superlative dissertation text," read the starred review of the Riverhead hc, LJ 11/15/13.]-Nann Blaine Hilyard, Zion-Benton P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.