The Surrendered [Hardcover]

Chang-rae Lee (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 9, 2010

Read an essay by Chang-rae Lee here.

The bestselling, award-winning writer of Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft returns with his biggest, most ambitious novel yet: a spellbinding story of how love and war echo through an entire lifetime.

With his three critically acclaimed novels, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the most talented writers of contemporary literary fiction. Now, with The Surrendered, Lee has created a book that amplifies everything we've seen in his previous works, and reads like nothing else. It is a brilliant, haunting, heartbreaking story about how love and war inalterably change the lives of those they touch.

June Han was only a girl when the Korean War left her orphaned; Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage where they vied for the attentions of Sylvie Tanner, the beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary wife whose elusive love seemed to transform everything. Thirty years later and on the other side of the world, June and Hector are reunited in a plot that will force them to come to terms with the mysterious secrets of their past, and the shocking acts of love and violence that bind them together.

As Lee unfurls the stunning story of June, Hector, and Sylvie, he weaves a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, the power of love, and the possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering oneself to another. Combining the complex themes of identity and belonging of Native Speaker and A Gesture Life with the broad range, energy, and pure storytelling gifts of Aloft, Chang-rae Lee has delivered his most ambitious, exciting, and unforgettable work yet. It is a mesmeriz­ing novel, elegantly suspenseful and deeply affecting.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Exclusive: Chang-Rae Lee on The Surrendered

The inspiration for The Surrendered has its roots in a project I worked on more than twenty years ago, while I was still in college. I was taking a seminar on modern Korean history, and I decided that I would conduct an interview with my father to fulfill the writing assignment, conceiving a reporter-at-large-type piece that would offer personal testimony and narrative set against a historical backdrop. I wasn't sure if he would agree. My father was twelve years old on the eve of the Korean War, and although over the years I had asked him a number of times about his experiences, his responses were typically vague and hurried; he never seemed to want to talk about that time, only briefly mentioning that his sister had died during the war from an untreated bout of pneumonia. But since I was taking a course with a special focus on Korea, he agreed to speak in more detail about that period.

My father's family was originally from Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, and they had joined the throngs of refugees who were heading south in an attempt to get behind the line of American forces. He first recounted a story about his favorite older cousin, who was pregnant and just about to give birth as the rest of the extended family was frantically packing up and leaving. My father was dispatched to tell his cousin that everyone was departing—explosions could be heard in the distance—yet even though she and her husband desperately wanted to go, she had already started her labors. She couldn’t be moved. Everybody soon left, and that was last time the cousin and her husband were seen alive; to this day no one knows what happened to them, whether they perished or survived the war and ended up living in North Korea.

Telling that story of his cousin seemed to break the grip of something on my father. He recounted again that his sister had died of pneumonia during the refugee march, then added, casually, that in fact his younger brother had died during their travels, too. This disclosure surprised me. I knew that he had lost a brother, this from asking him, as children often will, about how many siblings he had, matching the number against my uncles and aunts, but I remembered his saying that his brother had died in a "subway accident." I didn't think there was a subway in either Pyongyang or Seoul during his childhood, so I asked him when his brother had died, and how.

My father told me that in fact his brother had been killed not by a subway car but by a boxcar of a train full of refugees. They were among the hundreds who filled the cars. The car holding the rest of their family was packed tight, so he and his brother had to sleep on top of the boxcar. In the middle of the night the train halted violently, and his brother, who was eight years old, fell off, the train then lurching forward for a short distance. My father jumped down and went back and found his brother, whose leg had been amputated by the wheels of the train. My father carried him back to the car, to the rest of their family, as the blood—and his life—ran out of him.

I've been haunted by that story since I heard it, not only by the horror of the accident but also by the picture of my father as a boy, a boy who had to experience his brother's death so directly and egregiously. I was struck, too, by how unperturbed my father had always seemed to me, this cheerful, optimistic man who certainly didn't appear to be haunted by anything. But of course this was not quite true. The events of the war had stayed with him, and always would.

In recent years I began to consider writing a novel about that time, and what happened to my father and his brother kept coming back to me. I finally decided to try to write that scene, wondering whether a larger story might be instituted. Naturally the details changed quite drastically as I began to write, the story expanding in every direction, developing its own world and aims, and soon enough it was not my father's story at all. But the kernel of what had happened grew to become the first chapter of The Surrendered, which for me is not so much a war novel as it is a story concerned with the effects of mass conflict on the human psyche and spirit, the private odysseys that those who have experienced conflict must endure.

(Photo of Chang-Rae Lee © David Burnett)

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Lee's masterful fourth novel (after Aloft) bursts with drama and human anguish as it documents the ravages and indelible effects of war. June Han is a starving 11-year-old refugee fleeing military combat during the Korean War when she is separated from her seven-year-old twin siblings. Eventually brought to an orphanage near Seoul by American soldier Hector Brennan, who is still reeling from his father's death, June slowly recovers from her nightmarish experiences thanks to the loving attention of Sylvie Tanner, the wife of the orphanage's minister. But Sylvie is irretrievably scarred as well, having witnessed her parents' murder by Japanese soldiers in 1934 Manchuria. These traumas reverberate throughout the characters' lives, determining the destructive relationship that arises between June, Hector and Sylvie as the plot rushes forward and back in time, encompassing graphic scenes of suffering, carnage and emotional wreckage. Powerful, deeply felt, compulsively readable and imbued with moral gravity, the novel does not peter out into easy redemption. It's a harrowing tale: bleak, haunting, often heartbreaking—and not to be missed. (Mar.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (March 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489769
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489761
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #584,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chang-Rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A Gesture Life, and Aloft. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Chang-Rae Lee teaches writing at Princeton university.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

100 of 105 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Epic novel about war and remembrance February 17, 2010

By sb-lynn TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Short summary and review - no spoilers.

This novel jumps around in time and place - from 1930's Manchuria to 1980's New York and Italy. We start off in Korea in the early 1950's during the Korean War. We are introduced to one of the main characters in the book - a young girl we come to know as June, who is one of the many refugees who are fleeing their homes. She is only 11 years old, and seeking shelter, food and safety for her and her younger siblings.

This first chapter is just an extraordinary opening - and it is one of the most harrowing descriptions I've ever read of the refugee/wartime experience.

Other key characters include Hector, an American soldier who joins the army to get away from his small town after a tragic event involving his family. Hector is a wonderful character - he is a noble, decent man put in war time situations that could break anyone's spirit. We also meet Sylvie Tanner, the daughter of missionaries, who ends up in Korea just after the war taking care of Korean orphans with her husband. It is here that Sylvie meets up with Hector and June.

We know from the early chapters that take place in 1980s New York that June is trying to locate her her son and that she wants Hector to go with her. By going back and forth between time and place, we can see how early horrific wartime experiences changed their lives forever .

There is a tremendous amount of foreshadowing in this novel - in seemingly every chapter we are made aware of secrets and horrors from each character's past, and it is only at the end when we find out the whole story. In some ways this felt a bit manipulative, but not overly so and it did add to the book being a page-turner, especially towards the end. (And there is a good twist for people who like this sort of thing, and I do.)

This book is not for those who are squeamish about violence and tales of war. For anyone else, and for those looking for a big epic book that will transport you to several other (dark) times and places, this is for you.

Recommended.

67 of 74 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Arms and a woman February 7, 2010

By M. Feldman TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

In "The Surrendered," Chang-Rae Lee examines the effects of the Korean War on two survivors: a child, June, who loses her entire family in the flight of civilian refugees southward down the Korean peninsula, and, an American soldier, Hector Brennan, caught in the same retreat. Nearly starved, she follows him to safety, and then to a Korean orphanage, where Hector works as a handyman. Years later, their lives intersect once more, in the U.S., where Hector, who lives on the edge of down and out, still handles a mob and broom, and June, suffering from cancer, begins a journey to understand--if not solve--more than one mystery.

The scenes in the novel that are set during the war and afterward, at the orphanage, as well as a sub-plot set during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, run like a vivid thread through "The Surrendered." Here, Lee conveys, in compelling detail, the cost of the war not only in lives but in emotional suffering. These scenes, taut and well plotted, are the best part of the novel.

The depiction of the adult lives of Hector and June is less successful, primarily because Lee utilizes long passages of interior consciousness that add little to the characterization of either one of them. After a while, I found my eye sliding over these. Even descriptive passages are sometimes too prolix, as if the narrator could not bear to leave out a single detail, however irrelevant. A sheet of dryer fabric softener, for example, smells of lilacs, and then of the memory of Hector's mother's lilacs. As the characters pass through Siena, the narrator offers a tourist's guidebook sidebar on the festival of the Palio. Details of illness, addiction or even drunkenness--retching, nausea, injections, the growth of a tumor, the look of someone's vomit, and so on--recur, to excess. The book, nearly 450 pages long, would have been better if it had been shorter.

The plot of "The Surrendered" is intricate and ambitious. Its action occurs on three continents, over a span of decades, as it moves from Korea to Ilion, classically-named Hector's classically-named upstate New York hometown. (Lee sings of the real Ilion, where Remington Arms made the town.) It ends in Italy, in Solferino, site of a monument to a bloody 19th century Italian battle. There are also parts of the novel set in in Fort Lee and in Manhattan. So much happens that at times the plot strains credulity: an automobile accident is just too convenient, a passport fraud too easy, an unlocked cottage too handy.

At the center of the novel is June, the mostly unloved Korean orphan who achieves little happiness in her adult life. She is a sympathetic character. Her unnaturally smooth palms, the outward sign of a terrible physical injury, suggest that the trauma of her childhood is only superficially healed. If you are interested in Korea, you will not want to miss this story, which traces the impact of war not just on soldiers, but on civilians like June. It would make interesting reading alongside David Halberstam's fine history of the Korean conflict, entitled "The Coldest Winter." In "The Surrendered," June has set out on a journey in order to achieve a necessary reconciliation. Does she find it? One can only think of the Korean War itself, which to this day has no peace treaty, only an uneasy armistice.
M. Feldman

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Damaged Lives March 12, 2010

By Roger Brunyate TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Chang-Rae Lee has written an ambitious novel containing scenes of undeniable power. His ability to capture the collateral casualties of war was obvious from the first, and I found myself admiring both his writing and narrative technique, even as I was repelled by the grimness of the picture he was painting. But I could not fully warm to any of the characters. As the book went on, I found myself reading with growing impatience, as his skill at jumping around between time periods began to look like delaying tactics, making a long novel even longer without significantly deepening his character portrayal or developing his theme.

The setting of the novel ranges from China in 1934 to Italy in 1986, but the central events take place in an orphanage in Korea in 1953, where the lives of three people intersect. June is a young Korean girl who lost her parents and siblings during the flight from the advancing Communists in 1950. Hector is an American GI, a psychological casualty of the Korean War, now working as a handyman. And the lovely Sylvie, herself the daughter of missionaries, is the wife of the director of the mission orphanage. Both June and Hector become attracted to Sylvie, who has herself been traumatized by her experiences during the Japanese invasion of China in 1934. They are three damaged people trying in vain to find healing in one another.

Lee's handling of the back-stories is extraordinary. The opening sequence with June fleeing South is gripping; Hector's adolescence in upstate New York looking after his bar-brawling father is merely grungy, but his encounter with a young Korean prisoner is riveting; and Sylvie's violent introduction to love and betrayal is incandescent, far and away the strongest chapter in the book. Moving forward, the scenes in the mission, interspersed throughout the book, are generally well told, although it can be difficult to get a clear sense of the passage of time.

But it is in the after-story that Lee fails. The first flash-forward is intriguingly mysterious, but the facts soon emerge: June is dying of cancer and sells up her successful New York antiques business, heading for Italy to track down her son Nicholas, the fruit of her brief marriage of convenience to Hector. It soon becomes obvious that this later story is created solely as a framework to contain the flashbacks. Nicholas never gets fleshed out as a human being, and Lee is astoundingly cavalier in manipulating events to suit his purposes, introducing characters only to dismiss them on a whim, and stretching credulity to its limits. The book ends in the ossuary in Solferino, the 1859 Italian battlefield that is mentioned several times earlier in the novel, with the sole apparent purpose of having somewhere to end it.

In tracing the long-term effects of warfare, Chang-Rae Lee has a powerful theme. But it is difficult to maintain interest in damaged characters who, even through no fault of their own, are only half functioning as human beings. Sylvie is addicted to drugs; Hector is a compulsive drinker; June is so far gone in her sickness that her actions are unpredictable, and even in the orphanage it appears that her moral compass is damaged or missing. They are all half-people at best. Although we sympathize with their tragedy, and even discern glimmers of goodness among the psychic rubble, they make poor companions on a long journey to a place that is not very meaningful anyway.