A Review of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).

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A Review of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).
By Leslie J. Fernandez



Waiting for more of Ted Chiang’s work is like waiting for a drizzle in a drought. You soak it up greedily when it arrives but it rarely feels like enough. In the almost 30 years since his first publication, his oeuvre includes a grand total of 15 short stories, a novelette and a novella, with which he’s managed to amass four Hugo’s, Nebula’s and Locus awards each. But I rarely find myself wishing he’d speed-up his output. In almost everything I’ve read from him, it is abundantly clear the amount of research and meticulous attention that had gone into crafting each line. Chiang’s perfectionist tendencies are famously illustrated by him turning down a Hugo nomination because he felt the story had not turned out the way he wanted it to. His latest collection, Exhalation, is no different in scope and density from his previous work. Exhalation collects seven previously published pieces and tops it up with two brand new short stories. Though many of these have been published previously, some had limited runs and were thus extremely hard to come by, which makes this collection welcome news for those who have previously been unable to read The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate and The Lifecycle of Software Objects. Readers of his previously published work might also be interested in Chiang’s story notes, collected at the back of the book, which offer insights into the genesis for each of the stories.

Despite collecting pieces that span over 12 years, Exhalation has a number of through lines and common themes that crop up throughout the collection. I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Chiang recently when he visited UCR. He read aloud from The Merchant and the Alchemist Gate but preceded that with a scholarly talk on what he argued was the first time-travel narrative (A Christmas Carol), and an extended explanation of what plausible time-travel might look like. It was not what you might expect from a visiting author, but it was unsurprising coming from Chiang. Many of the questions that he raised in his own talk and that were raised during the Q&A centered around the question of free will and determinism and his collections follow suit. The Merchant and the Alchemist Gate features a closed-loop form of time travel told Arabian Nights style as a tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale. What Expected of Us—clocking in as the shortest piece in the collection at four pages—considers what might occur if a device was created that proves a lack of free will to its users. Spoiler alert: A lot of people lose their minds. One of the new stories written for the collection, Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, wrestles with the repercussions of a world where a device called a PRISM allows users to create divergent timelines at the moment of activation, and then communicate with their “paraselves,” taking us to the extreme end of free will where an awareness that there exists infinite multiple worlds begins to trivialize one’s choice in merely one world.

Chiang’s work often feels like classical science fiction in its attention to the specificities of the science involved—the title story, Exhalation, features a world of mechanical people with intricately and minutely mapped out physiologies—but this never comes at the expense of equally meticulous attention to the repercussions that affect the characters. Chiang’s genius comes from juxtaposing the most existential questions of our existence alongside the speculatively quotidian. Questions of memory, human relationships, and parenting are also prominent themes throughout the work. The novella-length The Lifecycle of Software Objects takes Alan Turing’s proposal of a child machine seriously, and questions whether it is possible to create a subjectivity without attending to the painstaking process of forming and nurturing it. Both Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny and The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, wrestle with the questions of parental influence alongside questions of the influence of technology. Chiang’s work often makes accessible esoteric philosophical questions while elevating our everyday life and relationships into something much more important than the merely quotidian. What I find myself most appreciating about this collection, and Chiang’s work in general, is the element of hope that suffuses it. Rarely do we get stories that end on nihilistic or pessimistic takes on the state of our technological futurity. This is not to say that these stories aren’t realistic. They are not naively hopeful. Rather, they generally contain an openness to possibilities and an acceptance of the ambivalent nature of our existence.  Chiang rarely has any concrete answers about life’s big questions, but he does offer a hell of a good story.

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Review Author: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

A Review of Eugenia Kim’s The Kinship of Secrets (Houghton Mifflin, 2018).

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A Review of Eugenia Kim’s The Kinship of Secrets (Houghton Mifflin, 2018).
By Stephen Hong Sohn


 
There is much to praise concerning Eugenia Kim’s second novel The Kinship of Secrets (Houghton Mifflin, 2018), which delves into a complicated family dynamic made unstable in light of the Korean War. Let us let B&N provide us with some basic contexts: “From the author of The Calligrapher’s Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart. In 1948 Najin and Calvin Cho, with their young daughter Miran, travel from South Korea to the United States in search of new opportunities. Wary of the challenges they know will face them, Najin and Calvin make the difficult decision to leave their infant daughter, Inja, behind with their extended family; soon, they hope, they will return to her. But then war breaks out in Korea, and there is no end in sight to the separation. Miran grows up in prosperous American suburbia, under the shadow of the daughter left behind, as Inja grapples in her war-torn land with ties to a family she doesn’t remember. Najin and Calvin desperately seek a reunion with Inja, but are the bonds of love strong enough to reconnect their family over distance, time, and war? And as deep family secrets are revealed, will everything they long for be upended? Told through the alternating perspectives of the distanced sisters, and inspired by a true story, The Kinship of Secrets explores the cruelty of war, the power of hope, and what it means to be a sister.”  

This description does a great job of giving the basics. After what is, at least in my opinion, a rather slow build up, the novel moves quite quickly forward, once the sisters are actually reunited. Inja’s acculturation in the United States is rocky at best, but the strong bond that she eventually develops with Miran is absolutely instrumental to her initial survival and her ultimate resilience. What I appreciated about Kim’s depiction is the rather effortless way in which one’s personal ties is set up against the larger dramatic backdrop of the Korean War. And, as my parents, have gotten older, their memories of the war becoming ever more hazy, novels like these remind me of the important work that fictional narratives can produce in continuing to bring to light contexts and situations that, for many, were lived experiences.

In this respect, the novel achieves perhaps its deepest, political textures. Indeed, once I finished the novel, I sought to find out more about the author, especially given the compelling author’s note that reveals how much of the work was actually auto/biographical. Such background information makes one wonder especially why it is that we continue to market narratives so clunkily, by presupposing that the lines between fiction and memoir are ever so clearly demarcated. Perhaps, what is most poignant about this novel is the way in which familial sacrifice is understood. Despite Inja’s tumultuous transnational migration, we know that so much of her life functioned with the prospect that she had multiple families that loved her. A deeply affecting work and a narrative that only grows stronger as it moves toward its conclusion.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

A Review of Rin Chupeco’s The Shadowglass (Sourcebooks Fire, 2019).

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A Review of Rin Chupeco’s The Shadowglass (Sourcebooks Fire, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

I was so excited to dig into the final installment of the Bone Witch trilogy. The adventures of Tea, Fox, Kalen, Kance, Likh, Zoya, and many others continue! I definitely didn’t want it to end, because I love these characters, and I loved the darkness associated with this series. In any case, let’s let B&N do some work for us: “In the Eight Kingdoms, none have greater strength or influence than the asha, who hold elemental magic. But only a bone witch has the power to raise the dead. Tea has used this dark magic to breathe life into those she has loved and lost...and those who would join her army against the deceitful royals. But Tea's quest to conjure a shadowglass, to achieve immortality for the one person she loves most in the world, threatens to consume her. Tea's heartsglass only grows darker with each new betrayal. Her work with the monstrous azi, her thirst for retribution, her desire to unmask the Faceless—they all feed the darkrot that is gradually consuming her heartsglass. She is haunted by blackouts and strange visions, and when she wakes with blood on her hands, Tea must answer to a power greater than the elder asha or even her conscience. Tea's life—and the fate of the kingdoms—hangs in the balance.”

The thing with this description is that it is sort of misleading. The description wants you to think that Tea is succumbing to a form of dark magic, but readers soon discover that a heartsglass that turns black can be evidence that someone has done something terrible to you. In other words, a blackening heartsglass can be a signifier of trauma rather than of evil. But the cost of wielding any magic in this world is a high one, so Tea’s quest to forge the shadowglass is one that is ultimately related to preserving the lives of those she loves. The problem with the quest for the shadowglass is that it would put an end to the life of her familiar, Fox, who has only retained a form of animation because of the magic that an asha can wield. In any case, much of the narrative momentum is created through the use of the bifurcated structure of two narrators. One appears in italics and is related to a bard that is documenting Tea’s quest, while the other is given to Tea herself.

The one problem I had with this final installment is that I found myself privileging one story over the other, and I became impatient to go back to Tea’s perspective! Chupeco is patient and clever, especially as she leads readers to wonder who it is that’s behind the Blight. You begin to realize halfway through that Tea’s been betrayed, but one of the reveals was definitely surprising and really knocked me off my readerly feet. The conclusion is naturally epic in its scope. It left me a little bit wistful and hoping that there could have been another outcome, but given how much darkness exists in this particular fictional world, it seemed a very fitting resolution. This series is one of my favorites that tends to be on the darker gothic side.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

A Review of Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End (Random House, 2019).

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A Review of Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End (Random House, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn


Readers have been lucky insofar as we’ve been graced with two publications from Yiyun Li in the last three years, but the circumstances that may have fueled this creative productivity are perhaps not ideal. Yiyun Li’s latest, the novel Where Reasons End (Random House, 2019), plumbs the depths of a parent who has lost a child (through suicide). The narrator, who remains unnamed (but in metafiction styling, there is a direct reference to an author who wrote A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) and is a proxy for the author herself, attempts to work through the death of this child (Nikolai) in part through the act of writing. The narrator is of course entirely aware of the limits of this practice but nevertheless returns inexorably to the fact of the words: that her child may be made again, however flawed, inaccurate, limited (flawed and limited are words that the narrator and Nikolai actually debate) in this creative construct.

The point is that the narrator can at least come as near to this thing she has created, this proxy for her child: it can become this type of comforting presence, at least so she thinks. But words (and stories and characters, however fanciful) make demands on the author, a fact that we are reminded of, because of Li’s past, absolutely effulgent work of creative nonfiction (Dear Friend, I Write to You in My Life to Your Life). The character Nikolai, the proxy son, that the author has generated through words, is ever demanding, constantly poking holes in the narrator’s logic, pushing her to consider the precision of her phrases. The back and forth between the narrator and Nikolai takes on the verbal sparring more often seen in plays, but Li reigns the narrative back in through brief reminiscences peppered throughout: a memory of the “real” Nikolai bounding down a street, the “real” Nikolai and his incessant desire to bake, the “real” Nikolai and his love for music. The character Nikolai often then intrudes upon the narrator’s own reminiscences, sometimes suggesting that these memories are inaccurate, maudlin, or entirely unnecessary.  

If there is evidence of a mind in absolute and utter grief it is in this never-ending interplay between character-Nikolai and the narrator-Li. At some point, there is a moment when the narrator and character-Nikolai discuss the problematics of eavesdropping, a subject which the narrator used to talk about at events and readings. You can’t help but realize that the readers are in on this intimate conversation, a form of eavesdropping that, though certainly painful, we understand is a more expansive way that the character-Nikolai might be resurrected, made recognized. In this more public act of exhibition, the collapse between the fictional narrator-Li and the author-Li has perhaps generated her most intimate work, one that reminds us that writing will always be a form of failure: it is in the striving that one is reminded of its limits and its possibility. And, after reading this particular work, I realized that I’m all about the adjectives. 

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

A Review of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (Knopf, 2018).

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A Review of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (Knopf, 2018). 
By Stephen Hong Sohn

It’s been a pretty rough quarter for me reading wise. I don’t think I’ve ever read as few books as this period of my life. I’ve been lucky to hammer down one new book a week, so I have to be a little bit more selective about what I pick. When I saw that Donald C. Goellnicht had posted a positive review of Warlight, I figured it was finally time to read it. Let’s let B&N give us some background: “In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself—shadowed and luminous at once—we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey—through facts, recollection, and imagination—that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.”

Warlight reminds me a bit of Roma Tearne’s latest in terms of thematic content: espionage during World War II. In both cases, there is a return to the past, but Ondaatje’s novel is perhaps a little bit more subjective because we’re so tightly connected to Nathaniel, seeing the events through his filtered perspective. Nathaniel’s understanding of his teen years is later complicated through Rachel’s re-emergence in his life. We get the sense that he doesn’t fully understand the gravity of what had gone on. Further still, once Nathaniel goes into a line of work that allows him a little bit more access to what his mother might have been doing during the war, we begin to see the cracks that appear in his comprehension of his youth. Amid the murky dynamics of childhood abandonment, Nathaniel manages to cultivate a fledgling love, but Nathaniel and Rachel are eventually forced to go into a form of hiding, due to something related to their mother’s service during the war.

The latter stages of the book are quite compelling, and one key reveal concerning the mother is told with both understatement and poignance. The novel rises in its quality through the mood that Ondaatje creates. In Nathaniel’s youth there is a sense of possibility and promise even amid the disappearance of their parents. It is only in Nathaniel’s adulthood that the strangeness of his childhood is finally contextualized. The novel makes clear, too, that this unorthodox upbringing ends up fragmenting Nathaniel’s nuclear family in ways that no one was likely to predict. A wistful work.  

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu