Customer Reviews

Edinburgh: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

Creeping toward the uncomfortable, Edinburgh exposes the taboo of pedophilia. This is a story of defeat, numbness, loss, love, revenge, and pinching reality. The events in the character's lives are stories we may have picked up along the way from friends or family, nothing too astonishing not to believe. A great book that makes you feel privileged to have read, like your now part of something larger.

There is a joy in discovering new novels by fresh young writers that compares favorably with the elation of returning to the works of the masters. Alexander Chee has burst onto the scene with a novel unique in language, in mode of storytellng, in nuances of imagery that the oft overused adjective "stunning" feels to be the only appropriate descriptor. Known only to this reader from his contribution to the touching anthology LOSS WITHIN LOSS, Chee emerges here in his debut novel EDINBURGH as fully groomed storyteller, wordsmith, poet, and excavator of the human plight. His ability to wrap a tough story in the atmospheric language that adroitly mirrors the onomatopoeia of the Asian language patterns while enchanting us with the beauty of Korean mythology and anthropomorphism takes what could be a loathsome tragedy and creates a sensitive coming of age and rites of passage tale.

The story is well documented on this site by the editorial and customer reviews and that is adequate to inform you of what lies between the covers of this seemingly short novel. But the story seems only a matrix to explore, with the metaphors of air/earth/fire/water that Chee so consumately weaves in this poetic tapestry, a young man's journey through the abyss and height of self discovery, of sexuality, of ancestral imprints, to the eventual knowledge of his pace in the cosmos.

Consider even the chosen title EDINBURGH: in the state of Maine (and in the state of youth) the main character enters a safe haven library whose ceiling is a fresco of that city in Scotland struck by the Great Plague and whose library contents contain the centuries old last words of a man dying from that disaster. Chee takes that particular moment to let us envision the past and the future of a young man on the journey to self discovery. How perceptions and memories of childhood eventually inform our sense of adult self, how the choices of repetition of pain and old habits can lead to self destruction or, conquering them, foster a spiritual state of grace and resolved peace - these are the gentle lines of thought that tie this wondrously written book tighly together.

Reading EDINBURGH is an ultimate joy, like hearing a new piece of music on its opening performance. Chee appears securely destined to be a very important voice in American literature over the next decades. Read him now, at the beginning, and grow. This is a stunning book.

The title is just the very first of one of the many surprises encountered in this extremely well-written, impressive, and multi-layered novel. There are frequent passages which are so on target and gorgeously done that they gave me chills. I did a lot of rereading in parts. This is a novel that eludes simply categorization such as 'Coming Out' or 'Issue' novel. Give it a try. This seems the start of a very promising career for Chee. Can't wait to see what he does next!!!

'Edinburgh,' is an exceptional debut novel by Alexander Chee that tells the story of a gay Korean-American youth, Aphias Zhe, nicknamed Fee, who survives sexual abuse by his choir director, Big Eric Gorendt. Fee grows up in Cape Elizabeth, 'a town still half full of farms' near Portland, Maine, as part of a multi-generational family. He is twelve when the story begins, and he auditions for the Pine State Boys Choir and is selected along with another boy, Peter, who becomes his best friend and first love. Fee's story is told on many levels: 'This is a fox story,' Fee says. 'Of how a fox can be a boy. And so it is also the story of a fire.'

The reader learns of Peter's demise from the first sentence of the prologue: 'After he dies, missing Peter for me is like swimming in the cold spot of the lake: everyone else laughing in the warm water under too-close summer sun. This is the question that no one asks me.' From his Korean grandfather, whose six older sisters were taken away by the Japanese Imperial Army to become 'comfort women,' Fee hears the story of the shape-shifting fox-demon, whose imagery will reappear to him often over the years. Fire is a recurring theme in 'Edinburgh': it brings immolation, purification, and transcendence.

The title, 'Edinburgh,' comes from the city in Scotland, and it's also a painted fresco on the library ceiling of Fee's part-time employer, Edward Speck, an Oxford-educated historian. Speck is an elderly bachelor who employs young men as his assistants; his mentoring of them is respectful and non-predatory, unlike that of the married Big Eric. One day, Speck shows Fee an old letter from Edinburgh that was found in the spire of a cathedral; it had been written by a man who was ravaged by the Black Plague. Much later, Fee builds a stone chapel on the private school campus where he teaches ceramics and coaches the swim team. These images reinforce the strong sense of transcendence that pervades Fee's story.

The narrative is sometimes choppy, sometimes lyrical, but always true, for Mr. Chee has written this compelling story with sensitivity and grace. Fee was afraid to tell, and he didn't want anyone else to tell. He garnered information on pedophilia from library books and newspaper articles. At home, he says about his family, 'I can see, they think I am still here. They can't see that I have a secret as big as me. A secret that replaces me.' The secret comes out when another boy tells, and Big Eric is arrested, then incarcerated in prison, along with his wife. Their infant son, Edward, goes to foster care, and then to his grandparents' house to live. About halfway through 'Edinburgh,' the point of view shifts from Fee to Warden, as Edward now likes to be called as a teenager. Warden is a student at the same school where Fee works, and after Warden becomes infatuated with him, Fee confronts demons from the past.

'Edinburgh' is a coming-of-age story that shows how someone can survive childhood abuse and devastating loss to emerge strong and secure. Alexander Chee is a gifted new author who writes with imagination and courage.

I enjoyed discovering how Chee presents this story in such a unique, blunt, and spiritual way. The plot moves fast enough to keep the reader's attention but slow enough that the reader has enough time to capture the drama of the moment. It is a deceptively easy read. Despite the simplicity of the language, the theme is complex on many levels. I also enjoyed the shift in the point-of-view in the third part of this book. Through most of the book the narrator is Fee. However, in the third section, "And Night's Black Sleep Upon the Eyes," the point-of-view shifts to Warden, who narrates this section. This shift in point-of-view contributes to the plot by allowing the reader to understand the background Warden and Fee share, as well as Warden's part in seducing Free or, at least, his willingness to be seduced by Fee. Most of all, I enjoyed Chee's masterful use of similes which pepper the narrative. I enjoyed this story very much and I recommend it to others.

A book I recommend to everybody for the language full of imaginary and poetry that does not weaken at all the core story of child abuse, but deepens the insight into the characters' feelings and what moves them.
Albeit the difficult story, a fluent reading, an up and down in emotions, a journey through a sensible boy's soul and life. I loved the Korean myth of the fox and learning about the bi-cultural aspects of Fee's life and thinking.
Beautiful metaphors and expressions that leave space to your own fantasy.
A promosing new star on the firmament of writers.

Alexander Chee's Edinburgh is necessary, is timely, and is downright gorgeous despite it's sometimes ugly subject matter.

This is the story of Fee--how his life ended up the way it did, on a beach, deciding to live instead of die.

It is also "a fox story. Of how a fox can be a boy. And so it is also the story of a fire." The significance of the fox comes from Fee's heritage--the myths of the shape-shifting fox demon and how that demon returns and speaks through those possessed. Most importantly, it is about how the fox demon turns back into a human being, back into a man.

The significance of fire is that it is how things die; they are set alight and then they extinguish, keeping their secrets:

"Burning hides what burns there. Somewhere deep in him was a memory of light that pierced him from end to end like a spit."

Mostly, it is a tragic love story. Unrequited love. Burning love. The horrible love of a man for young boys. The wondrous love of a boy for another boy. The unbearable love of a teenager for his teacher. The never-ending love of a boy for his lost sisters.

There is also a love so desperate that it sends its owner underground, beneath the earth into tunnels he builds so that he might hide from the love and bury himself alive: entomb himself within it for to do so would mean his beloved was trapped in that moment with him.

This is a rich, many-layered novel, filled with mythical allusions and using language that is always gorgeous. You will marvel at the beauty of these sentences even when what the author is describing is something you do not want to see.

Read it.