Chang-rae Lee lit up Lemuria Monday evening. Over 30 people attended the event, some devoted readers of Lee and some new to his work.
Lee, who immigrated to the United States from Korea with his parents at the age of three, talked about one of his motivations for writing a novel about the Korean War. His father had once told him the story of how he struggled to escape the violence of the Korean War as a child, of how he lost his younger brother to a gruesome fall from a boxcar crowded with others desperate to get away. As an accomplished novelist and teacher of creative writing at Princeton University, Chang-rae Lee patiently answered many eager questions from the audience.
After the event, I kept thinking about the excitement an author event generates. Why did I feel so giddy? I certainly was not the only one. Many of us on the staff at Lemuria–and certainly some of those in the audience–felt the same way.
Even though we may finish a novel and place it on the shelf, our experience with the novel goes on. It is what Sven Birkerts calls “the shadow life of reading”–we carry the book everywhere, our experience of the book and all of our life experience that relates to it. If we are lucky, we add to that experience the meeting of the author and other readers.
As Lee commented that evening, a novel is a work of art. We all know that anyone who cares about writing and books knows that an author shares a work full of heart and soul and commitment. When the reader meets the author, how can she not feel a little emotional? The author has touched the reader in some way and suddenly the author is there in front of you for a short period of time. Many authors, like Chang-rae Lee, are sincere and patient enough to give space to those of us full of curiosity and enthusiasm, full of stories, reflections and questions regarding the author’s work.
I had never read Chang-rae Lee before but after the first page I was a fan. The pages kept turning even though I was not initially ready to get into a big novel with such heavy themes.
The Surrendered is about the cost of war, in this case the Korean War. Lee follows three characters: Hector, a young man sent to fight in the war; June, a young Korean girl who must make heart-wrenching decisions during the war; and Sylvie, an American missionary working in an orphanage. Their lives intersect with all the heavy weight of the war burdening their daily struggles, and of course, the weight they carry for the rest of their lives.
Comments are closed.