Edinburgh: A Novel [Paperback]

Alexander Chee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 2002

Twelve-year-old Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys' choir in Maine whose choir director reveals himself to be a serial pedophile. Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but a deep-seated horror and dread accompany him through his self-destructive college days and after, until the day he meets a beautiful young student named Warden and is forced to confront the demons of his brutal past.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

When the director of a boys' choir in Maine molests his young charges, the damage he inflicts spirals outward in ever larger circles. The novel's hero, Fee, a Korean-American teen-ager, is unable to separate what has been done to him from his own budding desire for a fellow-choirboy, and is thus unable to save his friend from the same fate. Years later, as a high-school teacher, Fee discovers that the choir director's son is one of his students. Chee has chosen difficult territory for his first novel, but by balancing its anguish with fantasy and Korean folk tales, he keeps a sad story from becoming maudlin.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist

If a story about child molestation could ever be beautiful, this first novel comes very close to that unusual mark. Fee is a 12-year-old soprano in a boys choir in Maine. The choir director, however, is revealed to be a malicious pederast, who selects favorites from the choir and subjects them to frequent sexual abuse. The pain that Fee and his friends endure while growing up with this horrible fact, even after the director is imprisoned, is almost unfathomable. But Fee gets through it, although the dread stays with him all his life--through his self-destructive college days and as he courts a succession of lovers. Years later, as he begins teaching at a prep school, he encounters a beautiful student named Warden, the son of Fee's former choirmaster, who knows nothing of his father's deeds. Confronting this student, Fee is forced to contend with the demons of his boyhood and the very way he has lived his life. A spectacular, gripping, and gut-wrenching tale. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Picador (November 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312305036
• ISBN-13: 978-0312305031
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #282,959 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, sensitively told, December 6, 2001

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Edinburgh (Hardcover)

This beautifully written novel's subject matter will probably alienate some readers, but I urge you to read this entire review before deciding whether this book is for you.

Twelve year old Aphias Zhe, nicknamed Fee, has a crystalline soprano voice, and so when he auditions for a boys choir, he is immediately accepted. What Fee knows intuitively becomes concrete as the choir director, Big Eric, takes Fee and a few other boys on an outing in the woods: Big Eric is a pedophile who preys on the young boys' vulnerability. Where others cannot, Fee sees right through to the man and his preference for fair-headed boys like Fee's best friend, Peter. Fee, who is part Korean, part Scottish, is not a favorite; he watches mainly from a distance, knowing the danger Big Eric poses but unwilling to articulate it. He hopes that the false front Big Eric has constructed will never crumble for, if it does, Fee fears he will also be revealed for what he is. When the choir director is caught, the wake of his crime crushes his victims, even those who live to adulthood.

As Fee grows up, he appears to recover, but inside he wants to die. He is gay, not because of the choir director's crime but in spite of it. Fee wants love, tenderness, someone who can rival the affection he felt for Peter, and not the predatory sex Big Eric sought. Yet, Fee continues to be haunted by what happened. When as an adult he meets a blonde boy who reminds him of Peter and who, despite his young age, has a connection to what happened long ago, Fee must confront his demons.

While at times overly lyrical, the novel is a delicate coming-of-age story. Chee has a remarkable command of images and language which add rich layers to what could have been a simple plot. The emotion he infuses in his words makes Fee's pain and quest for love universal. If you think only gay men will enjoy this, think again. As a heterosexual woman, I found myself engrossed in this novel and its characters. Ultimately, EDINBURGH is about truth, self, and the yearning for a place in the world.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Ingeniously Conceived Modern Myth, October 30, 2002

By 

Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Edinburgh (Hardcover)

Alexander Chee's first novel is the tale of a demon fox who is finally captured. Aphias Zee or Fee is an American of Korean and Scottish descent. In early age Fee's grandfather tells him the tale of Lady Tammamo, a fox who fell in love and, after being ridiculed by the community after her husband's death, engulfed herself and her husband's body in flames. He believes himself to be a fox in the shape of a man. Greek mythology informs his destiny as well, subtly setting the stage upon which the events of his life play. Yet, above the decorous theatre is a profoundly human story of Fee's experience growing up in Maine and, along with eleven other boys, suffering sexual abuse at the hands of a Boys Chorus instructor named Big Eric. Sex and suicide surround Fee through his entire adolescence and teenage years. He learns somehow to survive with the elements of creation and death orbiting him constantly, but it is an empty sort of existence for him. Passion is expended on lovers he doesn't care for. The guilt of his former instructor attaches itself to him as he discovers quickly that he is a homosexual himself. His natural desire is tragically intertwined with the other's perversity. His first love, Peter, becomes for him a distorted mirror image of all he is not: blonde, straight and freed by death. Thus, he embarks on an endless struggle to merge with this image, to fall into it, be devoured and emerge cleansed by flame. Despite surviving (barely) through college, making close friends and finding a lover, Bridely, who he marries in a commitment ceremony, Fee is unable to escape from his past and the conception of his own destiny militated by his demon fox spirit. He is paired finally with a spectre from the past and the mirror image he longed to meld into.

The first most striking quality of Chee's unique prose style is his use of metaphor. With a lyrical intensity, the world is shaped by Fee's subjective understand of what surrounds him. Like the best of Eudora Welty's stories, the author uses metaphor to beautifully invoke experience with hyper-intensive feeling. The most emotionally unsettling moments of the book are captured with startling imagery. These moments not only convey the essential elements of the story, but also distort the world in a way to disturb and inspire your conscious interpretation of it. The understanding of desire and love are wildly twisted to unsettle and force you to think of the nature of their meaning. You are pushed to re-evaluate your own experience: "Do you remember what it was like, to be young? You do. Was there any innocence? No. Things were exactly what they looked like. If anyone tries for innocence, it's the adult, moving forward, forgetting." The structure of the novel impresses the need for these contemplations all the more. The first person, present tense of the narration impresses a sense of immediacy relevant for the dramatization of the characters' consciousness. Noticeably, the quotation marks of speech are experimentally removed letting the words uttered float freely in the air along with the sensitive impressions of the characters' thoughts. Yet, Chee's impressive expansion of the novels form does not delineate from the impact of the tale told. Although it is anything but a light read, it is still a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable novel. This is anything but a common coming of age story. The book is packed with intense, fully realised characters each of whom radiate a need to have their own stories told. The primary setting of Maine, so often an idyllic stage in fiction, is depicted as a troubled landscape, both turbulent and beautiful. It is interesting the final scene takes place in Cape Elizabeth's Fort Williams, an army fort well stocked in WWII that never witnessed the battles it was prepared to face. Now it is a popular park. The ruins left may speak more for the characters they surround than the characters speak for themselves. Sparkling with impressive imagery and powerful wisdom, Edinburgh is an incredible artistic accomplishment and a powerful debut.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A difficult review to write, May 16, 2002

By 

Simon Cross (RUSTINGTON, West Sussex. United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Edinburgh (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful, very intense novel, that left me quite stunned at the end of it, which is why this could be a difficult review to write.

Chees writing is not always the easiest to read, but it has great power and truth. He hauntingly conveys the horror of Fees situation both as it occurs, and the residual impact on the next twenty years of his life. Chee introduces characters sparingly, and nobody appears for no good reason.

This is not a light book, understandably, but if you have been interested enough by what you have read above to be reading this, then I recommend this novel to you. Go ahead and take the risk, Edinburgh will reward your efforts.

Finally, the above review from Publishers Weekly is incorrect, as it is not Fee who "embarks on a bizarre journey to find his identity, exploring his bisexuality while dabbling in drugs until he finally learns that his own absent father is also an imprisoned pedophile." It is another very important character that goes on that journey.