Long for This World: A Novel [Hardcover]

Sonya Chung (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 2, 2010

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, fleeing and searching, in her piercing and profoundly humane first novel. .

In 1953, on a small island in Korea, a young boy stows away on the ferry that is carrying his older brother and his wife to the mainland. Fifty-two years later, Han Hyun-kyu is on a plane flying back to Korea, leaving behind his own wife in America. It is his daughter, Jane—a war photographer recently injured in a bombing in Baghdad and forced to return to New York—who journeys to find him in the small town in South Korea where his brothers have settled. Here, father and daughter take refuge from their demons, flirt with passion, and, in the wake of tragedy, discover something deeper and more enduring than they could have imagined..

Just as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane introduced readers to a world that is both exotic and immediate, Long for This World illuminates the complexities and the richness of family bonds and establishes Chung as an exciting new voice in fiction..

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1St Edition edition (March 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416599622
• ISBN-13: 978-1416599623
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,473,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Han Hyun-ku appears on the doorstep of his younger brother's home in Korea nearly 40 years after he immigrated to America, the far-flung members of the Han family find their lives unexpectedly intersecting in this elegant debut novel. Han Hyun-ku's adult daughter, Jane, a photojournalist who narrowly escaped death from an explosion in Baghdad, follows her father to Korea, inwardly pleased that he has left behind her alcoholic, self-centered mother. Meanwhile, Jane cannot shake her memories of the harrowing experience that ended her longtime relationship with her ex and sent her to Baghdad. In Korea, Han Jung-joo, Han Hyun-ku's sister-in-law, accepts the arrival of these unexpected guests with her usual serenity, but as her worry for her pregnant, troubled daughter grows, the household begins to break apart. Han Jung-joo's younger brother, a divorced artist, arrives, precipitating events that change everyone's lives forever. Switching deftly between different characters' points of view, Chung portrays with precision and grace each character's struggle to find his or her place in the family and in the world. (Mar.)
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From Library Journal

The title of Chung's exquisite novel seems to be missing a word: "not long for this world" would be the easy, expected phrase. But little is easy or expected in this multilayered story of two brothers—one Korean and the other who chooses to become Korean American—and their scattered families, whose lives converge in a perfectly blended East/West house on a faraway Korean island. When Han Hyun-ku unexpectedly arrives at his younger brother's home, he is escaping an American life circumscribed by a detached wife and troubled son. His exhausted daughter, Jane, a renowned photojournalist of death and destruction, follows her missing father. Strangers that they are even among family, father and daughter are gratefully absorbed into a seemingly easy rhythm, but the temporary peace cannot ease inevitable tragedy. "Some people are not long for this world," Jane remarks. "The rest of us survive." VERDICT Readers who enjoyed superbly crafted, globe-trotting family sagas such as Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows, Naeem Murr's The Perfect Man, or Changrae Lee's A Gesture Life will swoon over Chung's breathtaking debut. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, Washington, DC

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1St Edition edition (March 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416599622
• ISBN-13: 978-1416599623
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,473,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sonya Chung's short fiction, reviews, essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, BOMB Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, and Sonora Review, among others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award and the Bronx Council on the Arts Literary Residency and Fellowship. She teaches fiction writing at the Gotham Writers' Workshop and New York University, and she is a regular contributor at the literary blog The Millions. In fall 2010 she will join the full-time faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University.

LONG FOR THIS WORLD is her first novel.

Photo credit: Robin Holland

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Long for this World April 9, 2010

By Gregory A. Zuroski

Format:Hardcover

I was introduced to Sonya Chung and her first novel, Long for this World, at a bookstore author appearance and I anticipated liking it. Still, I was really impressed by how good it is and how compelling the characters and the story are.

The story is that of the members of the Han family, some of whom have emigrated to the United States and some who have remained in Korea. Told from the perspective of Jane, an American-born daughter of immigrants, it develops the personal stories and the emotions of a handful of characters and in so doing, explores a number of themes including: the Korean-American experience; the immigrant experience; family and sibling relationships; friendship and attraction; and ultimately, on how the currents on which our lives float are formed by people and events around us, some close and some at some distance in time and place.

The portrait of Jane, the narrator, a photojournalist, is a real achievement. I was interested in her as soon as the story began and she just kept becoming more fascinating throughout the book. Making her a photojournalist and in fact a war correspondent was a very good artistic decision. It allows the author to describe events and characters visually within the media of a novel that is after all created of words and in that way, abstract. Jane views the world through a camera's lens and we see it framed in ways that she chooses. It is a very effective device. At her presentation, Ms. Chung indicated that she had worked hard to render this character realistically despite the fact that she herself had little personal experience with photography or photojournalism before researching for the book.

There seems to be conversation at how this book speaks to female readers especially.... I would like to add that I find the portrayal of male characters especially engaging. As an older man, father of three grown daughters, I identified with the immigrant physician Han Hyun-kyu and understood deeply his need to return to Korea and take a different look at his life and his world. He is an especially silent man but his character is somehow eloquent at conveying an unidentified longing for something more. (Note the title).

In Korea, we are introduced to Chae Min-suk, a visual artist, who helps move the plot forward, but whose personal life and art are of great interest as well. I was especially impressed with the depiction of Jane's younger brother Henry. His struggle with addiction and recovery, and his sister's sense of responsibility for him, is central to understanding her and her family. His is a different kind of "longing" and I was left thinking a lot about him and his relationship to his sister. I believe that Ms. Chung has succeeded wonderfully at writing a book about interesting men who deserve our attention and who have something to say to us, both male and female readers.

Jane's mother, pointedly referred to as Dr. Lee even by her own children, is a complicated and difficult character. The author has written honestly about her and the damage she inflicts on her family, but I still found the description of the character respectful and ultimately understanding.

One reviewer has commented that Ms. Chung's exploration of the history of the Han family makes readers want to examine their own. I had that same sense. I felt that if I could provide Ms. Chung with stories about my own immediate and extended family, she could develop an exciting, descriptive narrative to help make sense of it all.

Sonya Chung's writing reminds me of Chekhov. I think it might be the development of character and family relationships through attention to small but significant details and events.

Another reviewer compares reading Long for this World to attending a photo display at a gallery, but in such a way that the reader is required to make the connections between the images displayed and any larger meaning of the book. I agree that we are treated to a number of very vivid images but I feel that the novel is also tightly structured and very effective in narrating a larger, comprehensive story.

The title is wonderful and promises what the book delivers. The cover photo of the hardcover edition is also perfect and this visual image conveys the tone precisely. I am sure it will entice some readers to the book.

Long for this World is a fascinating and compelling read. I am recommending this book to friends and I eagerly look forward to reading more of Sonya Chung's work in the future. Read more ›

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Resonance March 8, 2010

By John F. Lehman

Format:Hardcover

Long for This World by Sonya Chung, Scribner, 270 pages

Reviewed by John Lehman of [...]

Let me be upfront with you, this is a beautifully written story that takes concentration. It is layered both in subject matter and in emotion. It's one where you dog-ear the "Main List of Characters" at the beginning of the book and return to it often. Sections of chapters not only change setting, but sometimes countries and time periodS. At first I found this complexity a fault, wished the author had spared me her pointillist approach, but then about half-way through the parallel lines start to intersect and like a masterful poem it is not longer someone else's story, it is our own.

As a Westerner (who has been to Korea) there is a tendency to think of the East in a feng shui kind of way. As Sonya Chung says of Han Jung-joo, one if the troubled women in Korea whose husband is a prosperous doctor and whose troubled daughter dies while pregnant, "One must focus on the tiny actions that make up the events of one's life. .. If one tends to the small things, the larger things fall beautifully into place; order is created and maintained." Except that it doesn't happen like that, at least in the way we expect it will.

Another surprise is that the author does an equally good job with understanding the males of the story as with the females, the young and the old (though the interchange between the American, Ah-jin and the daughter of her mentor concerning mothers and daughters occasioned by a photograph of a young Kenyan girl who'd undergone female genital mutilation is exquisite. Such dynamics are the heart and soul of this book which isn't afraid to ask questions like, what is home, family, love, and gives us the courage to ask them of our own experiences.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Confirms one big expectation, defies many others March 13, 2010

By Nina Goss

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›