The Surrendered
Chang-rae Lee, 2010
Penguin Group USA
435 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594489761
Summary
With his three critically acclaimed novels, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the most talented writers of contemporary literary fiction. Now, with The Surrendered, Lee has created a book that amplifies everything we've seen in his previous works, and reads like nothing else. It is a brilliant, haunting, heartbreaking story about how love and war inalterably change the lives of those they touch.
June Han was only a girl when the Korean War left her orphaned; Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage where they vied for the attentions of Sylvie Tanner, the beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary wife whose elusive love seemed to transform everything. Thirty years later and on the other side of the world, June and Hector are reunited in a plot that will force them to come to terms with the mysterious secrets of their past, and the shocking acts of love and violence that bind them together.
As Lee unfurls the stunning story of June, Hector, and Sylvie, he weaves a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, the power of love, and the possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering oneself to another.
Combining the complex themes of identity and belonging of Native Speaker and A Gesture Life with the broad range, energy, and pure storytelling gifts of Aloft, Chang-rae Lee has delivered his most ambitious, exciting, and unforgettable work yet. It is a mesmerizing novel, elegantly suspenseful and deeply affecting. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 29, 1965
• Where—Seoul, Korea
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., University of
Oregon (USA)
• Awards—PEN/Hemingway Award; Anisfield-Wolf Prize;
NAIBA Book Award
• Currently—lives in Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Chang-rae Lee landed on the literary scene in 1995 with Native Speaker, a detective story about much more than just another crime. Critics responded, and Lee's debut received a string of recognition, including a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Biography/Critical Appreciation. Everyone agreed that Chang-rae Lee was a writer to watch. Over the nearly two decades since then, he has published four more novels, all to wide acclaim.
Lee and his family emigrated from Seoul, South Korea to the United States in 1968. His family settled in Westchester, New York, and Lee eventually attended Yale and the University of Oregon, where he earned his M.F.A.
Lee's first novel, Native Speaker (1995), won numerous awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel centers around a Korean American industrial spy, explores themes of alienation and betrayal as felt or perpetrated by immigrants and first-generation citizens, and played out in local politics.
In 1999, he published his second novel, A Gesture Life. This elaborated on his themes of identity and assimilation through the narrative of an elderly Japanese-American doctor who remembers treating Korean comfort women during World War II. For this book, Lee received the Asian American Literary Award.
His 2004 novel Aloft received mixed notices from the critics and featured Lee's first protagonist who is not Asian American, but a disengaged and isolated Italian-American suburbanite forced to deal with his world. It received the 2006 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the Adult Fiction category.
His 2010 novel The Surrendered won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a nominated finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 2014 Lee published On Such A Full Sea, a dystopian novel set in a future version of the American city of Baltimore, Maryland called B-Mor where the main character, Fan, is a Chinese-American laborer working as a diver in a fish farm.
Lee a writer and a teacher, as well as the director of the M.F.A. Program at Hunter College of City University in New York City. Those fortunate enough to be his students get to learn from the man who knows the stuff of human nature—that the aftereffect of any act is the core of every great story, and that even the most conventional characters can bear the weight of unconventional story lines. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble and Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/12/2014.)
Extras
(From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview):
• If I weren't a writer," Lee reveals in our interview, "I'd probably be working in the food and/or wine business, perhaps running a wine or coffee bar—or even an Asian noodle soup shop."
• When asked what book most influenced his life or career as a writer, here is his response:
"The Book" doesn't quite exist for me—there are too many that influenced me in incalculable ways.... These, in no particular order, are several of my many, many favorites:
Dubliners by James Joyce—Stories so luminous that one would be instantly blinded by their beauty were it not for the revelatory poignancy of their narratives.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac—This is a wild and inspiring book, and was especially so for someone like me, a middle-class suburban kid who was always taught to color within the lines.
Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike—One of the few novels I might consider calling "perfect" —it's all here, in a virtuosic and utterly unified presentation: voice, characterization, narrative sequencing, keen social commentary, metaphorical/pictorial wizardry. Updike at the height of his powers.
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron—A torrential display of Styron's prodigious imagination and lyricism.
The Names by Don DeLillo—A brilliant, complex, brooding inquiry into the uses—and essential position—of language. A "novel of ideas" that goes beyond rgumentation and ultimately soars with the force of poetry.
(Autho nterview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Searing.... With The Surrendered, Mr. Lee has written the most ambitious and compelling novel of his already impressive career—a symphonic work that reprises the themes of identity, familial legacies and the imperatives of fate he has addressed in earlier works, but which he grapples with here on a broader, more intricate historical canvas. Though the novel has its flaws, it is a gripping and fiercely imagined work that burrows deep into the dark heart of war, leaving us with a choral portrait of the human capacity for both barbarism and transcendence.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Chang-rae Lee is fond of words like "accrete" and "accrue," words that try to name the slow, almost imperceptible processes by which experience acquires weight, mass and, if you're lucky, meaning. "Life, gathering," reads one full sentence in his ferocious and lyrical new novel, The Surrendered, and you couldn't ask for a better two-word description of what good fiction aspires to. This novel...gathers life greedily, hungrily, but with a certain stealth: Lee doesn't bolt it all down at once, as the refugee children in his story do. The Surrendered, his largest, most ambitious book, is about the horrors of war and the sorrows of survival, yet its manner is quiet, watchful, expectant, as if everyone, including Lee himself, were waiting to see what might accrue.
Terrence Rafferty - New York Times Book Review
Epic in scope, masterful in execution, heart stopping at times, and heartbreaking at others. The meticulous narrative unfolds over 52 years and across three continents. Nothing is rushed; nothing is overlooked. We can even feel the buzz of a window pane on our fingertips as rumbling Japanese military vehicles approach along a gravel road.... Lee understands that in art and in stories what is perhaps most valuable is not what can be explained but what can be felt.
Boston Globe
This is not a happy book, but it is a rewarding one. The Surrendered grabs your attention—sometimes terrifying you in the process—and doesn't let go until its final moment.... Its pages are breathtakingly alive.
The San Francisco Chronicle
Lee's masterful fourth novel (after Aloft) bursts with drama and human anguish as it documents the ravages and indelible effects of war. June Han is a starving 11-year-old refugee fleeing military combat during the Korean War when she is separated from her seven-year-old twin siblings. Eventually brought to an orphanage near Seoul by American soldier Hector Brennan, who is still reeling from his father's death, June slowly recovers from her nightmarish experiences thanks to the loving attention of Sylvie Tanner, the wife of the orphanage's minister. But Sylvie is irretrievably scarred as well, having witnessed her parents' murder by Japanese soldiers in 1934 Manchuria. These traumas reverberate throughout the characters' lives, determining the destructive relationship that arises between June, Hector and Sylvie as the plot rushes forward and back in time, encompassing graphic scenes of suffering, carnage and emotional wreckage. Powerful, deeply felt, compulsively readable and imbued with moral gravity, the novel does not peter out into easy redemption. It's a harrowing tale: bleak, haunting, often heartbreaking—and not to be missed.
Publishers Weekly
Beautiful, riveting, piercingly haunting.... The settings and times are masterfully interwoven to form an elegant, disturbing inquiry into courage, love, loyalty, and mercy.... This is a book to read in two or three long sittings, gulping pages, turning them as fast as possible to reach the perfect, inevitable ending.
Kate Christensen - Elle
June Singer is a middle-aged Korean woman living in the United States and dying of cancer, but before she dies, she wants to accomplish two things: find her son, who is drifting around Italy, and make a redemptive pilgrimage to the Chapel of Bones. She enlists the unwilling help of Hector, her son's father, whom she hasn't seen since the 1950s, when she was a child in a Korean orphanage and Hector was an ex-soldier working as the handyman. Throughout June and Hector's painful journey, we learn about the Tanners, the couple who ran the orphanage; Sylvie Tanner's childhood as a daughter of missionaries who were slain in front of her; the possessive love that June and Hector had for Sylvie; and the resulting calamity that has haunted them their whole lives. Verdict: This is a completely engrossing story of great complexity and tragedy. Lee's (Aloft) ability to describe his characters' sufferings, both physical and mental, is extraordinarily vivid; one is left in awe of the human soul's ability to survive the most horrific experiences. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal
With his signature empathy and artistry, Lee links emotionally complex events.... Profoundly committed to authenticity, and in command of a remarkable gift for multidimensional metaphors, Lee dramatizes the guilt and "mystery of survival" in scenes of scalding horror and breathtaking beauty.... Lee has created a masterpiece of moral and psychological imagination unsparing in its illumination of the consequences of bloodshed and war.
Booklist
The odyssey of a Korean War refugee becomes first the subject of, then a haunting overture to, the award-winning Korean-American author's fourth novel (Aloft, 2004, etc.). Lee's introspective and interrogatory novels seek the sources of their characters' strengths and weaknesses in their own, and their families' stories-nowhere more powerfully than in this exhaustive chronicle of three hopeful lives tempered in the crucibles of wars and their enduring aftermaths. In a patiently developed and intermittently slowly paced narrative that covers a 30-year span and whose events occur in four countries and on three continents, the entangled histories of three protagonists are revealed. We first encounter 11-year-old June Han, traveling with her twin siblings following the deaths of their parents toward safety with their uncle's family. June's willed stoicism and suppression of fear serve her well in extremity, but they will have a far different effect on her later life-shaped when she is rescued by American G.I. Hector Brennan (himself in flight from the memory of a painful loss). Hector brings June to Sylvie Tanner, a minister's wife who runs an orphanage (and whose own demons owe much to the savagery of history in another place and another time). Each character's past, motivations and future prospects are rigorously and compassionately examined, as the author follows them after the war. In its ineffably quiet way, there really is something Tolstoyan in this searching fiction's determination to understand the characters specifically as members of families and products of other people's influences. The characterizations of Hector and Sylvie are astonishingly rich and complex, and the risk taken in depicting the adult June as the woman readers will hope she would not become is triumphantly vindicated. A major achievement, likely to be remembered as one of this year's best books.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the orphanage, June is a bully to the other children and shows affection only to Sylvie. Yet when we first meet her, she is incredibly caring to her sister and brother. What do you think caused this change in her personality? How did her experiences as a young girl shape the adult she became?
2. Hector seems to develop true feelings for Dora. If things had ended differently in the final scene with Dora, do you think he would still have gone off with June? Why or why not? Do you think his experience with Sylvie colored his relationship with Dora? How?
3. Do you think Sylvie and Tanner would have adopted June had things not happened the way they did turned out differently? Why or why not?
4. June seems fixated on finding Nicholas even after it becomes clear that he is not who he says he is. Why do you think she is so focused? Why do you think she needs to find him?
5. If you’ve read Chang-rae Lee’s work in the past, you know that he writes often of identity. How do these themes play out in The Surrendered? Of Hector, June, and Sylvie, which character do you think has the strongest sense of identity? The weakest?
6. Each character undergoes a traumatic experience that ends up shaping the course of his or her life: Hector’s father’s death, June’s loss of her family, and Sylvie’s experience in Manchuria. How do these events change their characters? Do you think each person’s life would be different had these traumatic events not occurred?
7. The book A Memory of Solferino recurs throughout the novel and is passed from Sylvie to June to Nicholas. What do you think the book means to each character and how does it influence the choices they make?
8. Although The Surrendered is very much about war, the events of the Korean War itself make up a very small part of the book. Why do you think the author chose this approach? What point do you think he was making? How does this relate to his choice of title?
9. Discuss the idea of mercy in the book. Which characters do you think most exemplify this trait? In which scenes does the idea of mercy seem to be the guiding force?
10. Hector is born in the town of Ilion and is named after Hector in the Iliad. Discuss heroism in the book. Are any of the characters heroes? Do they behave heroically?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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