Books465 entries
Chang-rae Lee - The Surrendered
Released: 20/05/2010
Little, Brown
Lee captures the horrific violence of war and its enduring emotional trauma in his gripping third novel. His three main characters experience unimaginable brutality in China and Korea in the mid-20th century. Their anguish remains a constant companion as they struggle to make human connections and rebuild their lives.
For more information visit: http://www.littlebrown.co.uk/Title/9781408702383 Buy: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/140870238X?ie=UTF8&tag=cultur00-21&linkCode=as2&ca…Page [1]
70 %
Publishers Weekly“A powerful book...” It's not only ambitious and complicated, following several story lines across six decades and three continents, but its subject matter is difficult, tackling violence and the devastating aftereffects of the Korean War in both Korea and America...
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70 %
The Independent“Lee writes with compelling directness...” The plot appears contrived and unbelievable in places. There are too many scenes of casual cruelty, so that the reader becomes almost desensitised. The beauty of this novel is the way Lee translates these flaws into luminous images...
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70 %
Guardian“Intermittently offers itself as a modern variation of The Iliad...” This is hefty saga territory, but the novel's length is still gratuitous. It is not even that Lee's story receives particularly patient unfolding, simply that he tells us everything several times...
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90%
Financial Times“So good it will drive you crazy that it’s not perfect...” Instants of sharply realised vitality that Lee does as well as anyone writing fiction today and which help you through the bad stuff, on and off the page. What more can you ask of a novel?...
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50%
The Times“Overwrought and overwritten...” Its power, particularly in the unflinching description of the horrors its characters endure, is undeniable, but it ends up hamstrung by Lee’s overly obvious desire to produce fiction on an epic scale...
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70 %
The New York Times“The most ambitious and compelling novel of his already impressive career...” Though the novel has its flaws, it is a gripping and fiercely imagined work that burrows deep into the dark heart of war, leaving us with a choral portrait of the human capacity for both barbarism and transcendence...
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60%
The New Yorker“Commendably ambitious, extremely well written...” Lee is a gifted chronicler of war, but “The Surrendered” also squanders those gifts, in a misguided attempt to choreograph a satisfyingly “good read”—what David Shields calls “the moves the traditional novel makes..."
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70 %
The Telegraph“The story of how to deal with the dying is never “nearly over”...” Lee’s novel manages to be both an ossuary, with bones piled up in commemoration and warning, and a gripping page-turner. At the same time, The Surrendered sees itself as a blockbuster in The English Patient tradition...
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