On Such a Full Sea
Chang-rae Lee
1 ratings • 1 reviews
On Such a Full Sea
Chang-rae Lee
1 ratings • 1 reviews
From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary quest in a shocking, future America. On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class—descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China—find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.
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I still haven't read a dystopian novel that has characters with actual dimension, differentiation - strengths and weaknesses. This novel is no different. In general, I've noticed that in Dystopian novels, so many words are needed to generate a believable dystopian reality that characters - their actions, descriptions, and dialogue- are used as instruments to build up these worlds, instead of being actual characters you can love, hate, be curious about. I always feel SO detached from these characters and have trouble eating while reading these books because there's a persistent feeling of dread in my stomach.
Separately, I was wondering why the novel felt so male-gazey because I thought the author was a woman,...but it turns out it's a guy! Though there weren't any inappropriate sexualizations of Fan, I did notice Fan is a really flat character who never talks, but we're supposed to invest in her because the omnipresent narrator keeps insisting she's this strong/unique perspectived/brave woman. She is put through a lot of interesting dilemmas in which she exerts ~just~ enough effort to get herself out of.
Not only is she flat, she's also written painfully unrealistically... Here is this 16 year old girl who is pregnant but just never ever gets fat (lol.) and never has pregnancy pains and rarely ever talks. WHY do male authors just love female characters like this (I just finished watching Roma - similar thing going on.)
Anyways, aside from the flat characters, the author did do a creative job of illustrating the different social and economic dynamics through Fan's adventures. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the counties - where, it seemed to me, people were the happiest. It was really beautiful when Fan realized that there were real, un-clipped-un-curated trees in the counties, that she had never seen before in Baltimore.
The conflicts and turn of events were surreal, very Spirited Away esque but creepier (like those girls in the room/closet who all had smiley moon eyes wtf??)
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