Long for This World

by Sonya Chung

Book Overview

Pushcart Prize nominee Sonya Chung has displayed her stunning talent in her award-winning short fiction and essays. Now, she renders the compelling story of a troubled family straddling cultures,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416599622
• ISBN13: 9781416599623
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Thought Provoking and Entertaining

Long for This World is bold and subtle, thought-provoking and entertaining. Page after page is filled with writing that made me think: Aha! I know that feeling, but could not articulate it (at all, let alone as beautifully), revealing the many layers that can course through a single moment. The story of the Korean American Han's and the Korean Han's covers a panoramic distance across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Yet the story is not sprawling, it is deep and intimate, filled with the thoughts and feelings of an array of distinct and beautifully rendered characters. Although the main character Ah Jin (Jane) is a war photographer, and there are vivid scenes that take the reader into the war zone, the most dangerous moments in the story seem to occur during ordinary interactions; between a daughter and her mother, a sister and her brother, a husband and a wife. Much of the story takes place in a small town in Korea inland from the ocean, where "...there is little that happens here in the country, and yet the air moves, it is dynamic, taste and texture and life happen in the breeze." Although a lot happens in this story, we also get to experience what happens "in the breeze." Just like a stop-motion movie that shows a field of flowers blossom in the springtime, we get to see the inner shifts and changes inside the characters, the story takes us places we can't ordinarily go in real life. Even minor characters are rendered with finesse. Dr. Lee, as Jane calls her mother, is a remote woman, who (ironically) is more devoted to her psychiatric career than to her family. Jane is not close to her mother, yet she tries to imagine what her mother's life was like when she grew up. She imagines that Dr. Lee's mother was probably a woman chasing after social status and romantic affairs, disregarding her child, who later takes on the same self-absorbed traits. Through the thoughts of her daughter, even the selfish Dr. Lee is portrayed with complexity and tenderness. As I began to reach the end of Long for This World, I wished with every turning page that there were more pages (not less) ahead. In those final pages I was not prepared for how the story had grabbed me, how much I cared for the characters and wanted to spend more time with them, and how the final events would sweep over me emotionally. In Long for This World Sonya Chung beautifully captures the contradictions, the weaknesses and strengths, the love and hate that swirl together within people and within relationships, and that meld beautifully in this book, leaving the reader richer for having shared in this story.

A terrific multilayered novel

This was really lovely, a story of Korean and Korean-American families -- how they come together and pull apart -- and art and loss, all done with a true and light touch and no excess sentimentality. Chung has a great ear for language and an eye for nuance, and pulled me in steadily and surely -- by the end of the novel I was a bit surprised to realize how much I cared about every single character. There's a lot of heart in this book, and nothing overplayed.

Deeply Moving

This beautiful novel's complexity kept me riveted but it was the deeply moving characters and story that brought me such reading pleasure. The book's intelligence and warmth are truly special.

Confirms one big expectation, defies many others

I attended the University of Washington's MFA program with Sonya Chung. While the rest of us were jostling to prove our Original and Unique Voices, Sonya attended to the life around and inside her and fashioned stories whose wit and intelligence and feeling came from this close attention and the kind of loving relationship with language that produces simply better results than an agonistic and skeptical relationship with language. I knew, for certain, her first novel would be a fine strong thing. It is something to live with, and not simply to admire. Sonya destroys here every stereotype I confess I bring to novels summarized as stories of multi-generational immigrant experiences. The characters follow no scripts, they disappoint themselves, surprise themselves, and surprised me so many times. I liked so much the inner lives she gives the older characters--they are not trapped by memories and alienated from a present they can't read. What they want and what they know are so much richer than what is usually written for older men and women in novels purporting to span generations--indeed, no character serves only as a foil or support for another. We may believe we are tracing the spiral of Jane's life as the novel's center, but that really is not the case. The novel is a series of overlapping and interlapping spirals, its construction sliding back and forth in time makes legitimate demands on the reader instead of flaunting the writer's sleight-of-hand. The characters' flaws matter to my judgment of them, I still don't know how much I like Jane although my interest in how she made her choices and how she saw herself and others never flagged. Images of lyrical beauty, and moments when characters seem to see into something, are fleeting and often overturned--this is not a novel that keeps coming a stop to Be Beautiful or Reveal A Truth. A woman's hairdo, a dog, a hotel room--these are some of the details that stay with me as belonging to the world of the novel, it's hard work to leave a reader with strong memories of concrete stuff. I can promise you that this novel speaks from its intelligence to your own. You will be surprised and disturbed throughout, no character will end up doing or being what you expect, and you will have the pleasure of *meeting* a writer who absolutely and ardently respects your intelligence and your attention.

A Wonderful Debut

Long for This World is as much a testament to the craft of fiction - voice, setting and structure - as it is an artifact of genuine feeling. As Chung unravels the intertwining lives of an extended and multi-generational family of immigrants, each member coming to terms with old challenges as he discovers new ones, she deftly immerses readers in memories of an all-too-real world, rather than simply leading them through it by the nose. Reading this book is something like discovering what Murakami's stories might have become if they weren't so obsessed with American pop culture and supernatural plot lines: a subtle yet sweeping exploration of the human family, on its own terms.