On Such a Full Sea

A Novel

De: Chang-rae Lee

Narrado por: B. D. Wong

Duración: 11 h y 5 m

Resumen del Editor

From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker, The Surrendered, and My Year Abroad, 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 listeners 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.

©2013 Chang-rae Lee (P)2013 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more...With On Such a Full Sea, [Chang-rae Lee] has found a new way to explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate, betraying, lonely human heart.” (Andrew Sean Greer, The New York Times Book Review)

“I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews, but faced with On Such a Full Sea, I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?” (Porochista Khakpour, The Los Angeles Times)

"In his latest and boldest novel, On Such a Full Sea, Lee’s characters are Chinese immigrant workers in the United States - specifically Chinese workers from a long-elapsed China toiling in a fast-declining America a century or so from now. For Lee’s heroine, Fan, the issue is not acclimatization but self-discovery. The adventures of this feisty yet wary protagonist, together with a bleak but arresting vision of the future, keep the reader rapt and concerned for the fate of both beleaguered character and battered brave new world." (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Intriguing but slow

Any additional comments?

As a person who needs a story with some momentum, I wasn't able to get into this book. The writing is beautiful, with careful and sparse diction. The author creates a strong sense of place, with an atmosphere that is worrisome most of all in the degree to which everyone treats it as normal. The main character is described (at least in the portion I read) from a detached vantage point that leaves her deliberately somewhat opaque. The anonymous narrator is perplexed by her decisions. The narration was perfectly suited to the portion of the book I listened to.

While I did become curious about what happened to Fan and how her journey went, the pace did not pick up early enough in the book, nor was I sufficiently attached to the characters, to continue listening. I liked the world-building but I didn't have the willpower to keep paying attention. Yet this wasn't a book that I sought a refund for, because it felt like it might be sufficiently worthwhile to try again when I have more patience.

If you are a listener who prefers relatively fast-paced books, think twice about this one. Or, if you are a listener with a lot of patience, please post a review to let the rest of us know if it's worth the effort!

Overrated!

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Chang-rae Lee's "On Such a Full Sea" (Sea) received very strong reviews from the New York Times and The Guardian. I was less than impressed. Sea has an imaginative premise, but lacks a solid story to maintain the reader's engagement. Throughout Sea the reader never feels a sense of conclusion as so many questions and issues are unresolved. At points Sea seems like a series of unconnected short stories with only a single familiar character. References to dystopia science fiction theme are overblown (one reviewer comparing Sea to Brave New World). Chang-rae Lee leaves you in dark relative to the development or history of the dystopia society.

I will pay Chang-rae Lee his due respect as a writing of prose. He is the master of describing what others are feeling, observing, or experiencing. Ultimately, despite the technical perfection of the writing the reader just doesn't care about the characters.

I have read 56 books in the last two years, where Sea ranks in 44th position (21%).

I kept hoping, but...

I really wanted this book to lead somewhere, but for me it didn't. the best part was B.D. Wong's read.

plot spins out unevenly

Overall the book is an interesting read but it is told so unevenly that it got in the way of enjoying it.

Thrilling and well-narrated

Wonderfully performed, and a very human story set in a unique take on the future.

feels like part one of a serial

What did you like best about On Such a Full Sea? What did you like least?

It is an engaging story, but too much of the storyline is unexplained. I would read part 2 (assuming this is going to turn into a serial) just to see what happens next...

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

I thought all of it was very interesting.

Have you listened to any of B. D. Wong’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

This was the first time I listened to Wong narrate. I thought he did a wonderful job!

Could you see On Such a Full Sea being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

no

Riveting alt-future / dystopia(?)

Compelling and dark, yet with shades of hope, this provocative story takes us through a possible future - if the ever-growing US of A were to lose its place as a world power and instead decline for an extended time.

There was no singular event that triggered this alt-future in Lee's unique world. One could even imagine bright stories existing in this world. But would they be as compelling?

Lee's narrative voice pulls the reader along, and somehow manages to soothe some of the darker moments. Not that the darkness is sugar-coated, but when wondering if maybe it was too dark to continue, somehow I kept listening. The story telling hit just the right notes for this reader.

Wong's narration was delightfully transparent, with excellent pacing and distinct voices.

Filing this one under #ReadAgain. (If only Audible would let readers sort or tag books in our ever-growing libraries...)

Literary dystopian fiction

Chang-Rae Lee's dystopian story of an America in decline, occupied generations ago by "New Chinese" who have displaced the Anglo and African-American residents of the major cities and pushed them out into the surrounding, anarchic "Counties," reads like one of those dystopian novels written by a literary author who's decided to try his hand at dystopian novels. I could compare On Such a Full Sea with Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, or Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, or Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. All of these books are similar - they depict a world in which economic and environmental collapse has brought down the old governments, and new peoples, new orders, have filled in the gaps. The haves and have-nots are more sharply divided. Outside the enclaves of the privileged is lawlessness and a grinding fight for survival.

On Such a Full Sea is well-written literary fiction that covers all of this ground in an engaging story, but it never convinced me that Chang-Rae Lee is more than a visitor to the genre. There isn't a lot of imagination in his post-collapse story, no technological speculation, very little in the way of reimagined futuristic society, just some issues of identity and class and racial divides that still exist even in a reconfigured landscape, and a heroine who is an impressive, admirable, yet very ordinary young girl who sets off into the Counties looking for her boyfriend, who has disappeared.

Fan, the main character, is a diver for fish in B-Mor (formerly Baltimore). The story is ostensibly told after the fact of the events described, in which Fan has become a kind of legend, an inspiration for the people of B-Mor. The B-Morans, descendants of Chinese workers who came to the East Coast after an undescribed collapse of the United States, are the "working class" of this future. The "Charters" are the privileged wealthy who still live the equivalent of middle class to affluent lifestyles, though as the book progresses and Fan and meets several groups of people from various walks of life, it becomes apparent that even for the Charters, the economy is such that a fall from grace, consignment to the laboring class or even banishment to the Counties, is always a worrisome possibility.

Fan's adventures take her through some harrowing (but much less harrowing than some dystopian writers would depict) adventures in those Counties, which really aren't Mad Max wastelands but more like a Wild West in which some towns have well-regulated law and order, others are ruled by despots, and others have no law at all. Then she goes through a series of stays with Charter families, some of them kindly, some of them creepy, all of them a bit blinkered by the privilege of their own existence.

Then there is an ending, which was, I suppose, a literary ending.

It's a good book in the sense that it was well-constructed, with a lot of prose that waxes more elegiac than usual for sci-fi, and Fan is a likeable, sturdy, determined girl.

Still, I have a bit of a bias against authors who give the impression they are slumming with sci-fi. Cormac McCarthy did it with The Road. Kazuo Ishiguro did it a little with his book, whose science fictional premise was thin and nigh-on unbelievable. Margaret Atwood actually writes SF even if she's taken some flack for eschewing the label. David Mitchell is a literary author who embraces the genre.

Chang-Rae Lee seemed to be telling another story, with dystopian fiction as his medium. It's a good story, but it did not really embrace the elements of the genre, and so to me it lacked the imagination to be truly brilliant. It's a good book for those who like some literary-flavored speculative fiction, but it is not likely to impress veterans of the genre.

Hard to connect to main character

The entire story is written in third person so I found it hard to get to know the main character.

Uniquely Compelling Tale

The writing was exquisite, the story both riveting and provocative and I already searched for my next book by narrator. He's soothing and poetic and brings the words to life with evocative prowess.