Customer Reviews

Long for This World: A Novel

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Long For This World is a family saga, but it's not just a simple "story of us." The novel has an unforgettable plot that places the story in many realities, geographic and metaphysical. Although it explores the missed opportunities and tragedies of two branches of the Han family (one in America, one in Korea), Chung has deftly placed the story in the larger backdrop of the human family. The first death the protagonist Jane experiences is one in a distant Syria and it's part of her job as a photojournalist. She doesn't know it, but it will be one of several deaths in her life...each getting increasingly closer to home.

I agree with the other reviewers at this site who compared Chung's writing to Murakami and Chekhov. Chung's writing contains the crepuscular magic of Murakami and the fine-tuned alertness of Chekhov. She has a keen eye for human relationships and the ties that bind. Her probing gaze delves into the different rooms in the human heart, rooms of desire, despair, longing, escape, indifference, and discovers that sometimes it's in the empty rooms--the rooms we deliberately leave empty, thinking them redundant--that our destiny lies.

Long after I finished this book I was haunted by the characters and the choices they made. Although Long For This World is a page turner, my advice is to resist the temptation to rush through it. I urge you to slow down and savour it.

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.

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.

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.

I can't say enough about this book; complex and so moving, the characters are real enough that you expect to meet them on the street; they stick with you long after the last page--you hope to get an email update on what happened next. It is an immersion in an unfamiliar culture with none of the sometimes daunting concern that not exactly understanding the references, or the cultural code, will be a chore; yet also without tedious explanations. The story unfolds in graceful, resonant prose, accessible yet dipping into the reader's deep undercurrents of thought and feeling. This book has impact. And, the people in Ms. Chung's novel are people first: flawed, complete, knowable; and then they are women and men, children and parents, survivors and casualties; and then they are Korean. This was a wonderful read.

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.

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.

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.

Long For This World -- the freshman effort of debut writer Sonya Chung -- is mostly about survival. Time and again in this short and assured book, Ms. Chung focuses in on loss and renewal; what each of us do to survive, even when we don't know all the answers and sometimes when we don't know the questions.

The story starts in 1953 on a remote island in South Korea, where a young boy and his older brother and sister-in-law make their way to the mainland and a future. Now, decades later, the young boy, Han Jae-kyu, is a respected doctor with an efficient wife, two fine sons, and Min-yung, his pregnant daughter who is dealing with severe emotional/mental problems. His older brother, Han Hyu-kyu -- who has immigrated to America, decides to flee his cold and undemonstrative wife Lee Woo-in and make his way to his brother's door; nearly simultaneously, his older daughter Jane (a war photographer who has been injured in Baghdad) arrives as well.

As the Koreans and Korean-American families get to know each other (and strive to know themselves), the older brother ruminates, "How did they get here? A series of decisions: flight from one's home and family; immersion in a foreign world; disconnection from a set of rules or social expectations; an allowance, judgment compromised, the conception of a child; a rushed marriage...flung into a roulette of forces."

For this reader, the story soared when the juxtaposition of the two worlds (Korean and Korean American), rife with their individual choices, converged. I learned a lot about Korea and its customs and mores. A bit less successful was the focus on the American offspring; Jane (the only character who speaks in first person) and her brother Henry who is a recovering substance abuser. Some of their story is told instead of FELT; I wanted a more visceral connection with these characters and instead, I felt my mind was engaged more than my heart. (Caveat: this is my subjective reading experience and others may find a stronger connection).

Ms. Chung wants to leave us with this impression: "Some people are not long for this world. The rest of us survive. For whatever reason, we are still standing, the lasting ones. Why us and not them? No one knows and no one speaks of it." The reader will discover who the survivors are along the journey and may be able to puzzle out the "whys." This is a talented new author and she will likely keep getting better and better.

Long for this World, by Sonya Chung, is the story of a Korean family spread across the world. The book follows the family members over a series of decades, and the perspective shifts constantly between individuals and places, so that the reader is equally connected to all the characters. As expected with a novel of this sort, there are family tragedies such as miscarriages and unexpected deaths, but the book also addresses the horrors of war and genocide through the eyes of Jane, a globe-trotting photographer. Despite the occasionally dark topics, the overall tone of the novel is uplifting. While the scale of the book is large, the tone is surprisingly intimate, and I felt as though I was viewing the Han family from within, rather than without.

I enjoyed this book immensely. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in reading about families or modern life.