I read a lot of literary fiction. It's where my interests normally tend to land, so I was really excited to see a book labelled "literary fiction" in this month's Kindle First offering from Amazon. Typically the Kindle First books are genre reads that I'm not interested in, like romance (or romance masquerading as historical fiction). So I downloaded The Hundred-Year Flood by Matthew Salesses. It's about a half Korean, half Caucasian guy named Tee, who is adopted by an American couple at birth. The novel opens with Tee reeling from 9/11, the suicide of his uncle, and the revelation that his aunt was having an affair with his father. Tee deals (or doesn't deal) with all three issues by skipping out on his last year of college for Prague.
(I would so move to Prague, and I don't even need emotional devastation to do so. Honestly, the main impetus for picking this book was that city. I have a minor obsession with it.)
Tee spends most of the book in his own head, obsessing over his parents' imploding marriage, his birth mother, and a beautiful, much-older woman named Katka, who just happens to be married to an artist he befriends named Pavel. The three of them, along with another Czech with the American name Rockefeller, chat lightly around the Velvet Revolution and drink.
What struck me most about this book was that while the prose is very elegant and at times almost lyrical, Tee never goes anywhere. He circles around his issues and his neighborhood, very often spelling out for the reader exactly how his story mirrors his father's, but he does next to nothing about it. At times it seemed like the whole novel was a written account by a disinterested third party, one who simply wrote what he saw as he saw it--the court reporter approach. I wanted more than that for Tee (and for Prague, dammit). There was a comment by Salesses in the afterword that seemed very telling to me: he mentions he worked on this book for a decade. That lyrical prose sometimes felt overworked, like he literally spent a decade writing and rewriting certain passages, struggling for a way through Tee's ennui.
Ultimately, I didn't find The Hundred-Year Flood to be rewarding, although I think Salesses could be a great writer. I'll be interested to see what he does next.
Title: The Hundred-Year Flood
Author: Matthew Salesses
Star Rating: 2 out of 3
Buy, Borrow, Skip: Skip
Bonus: A new photo of Pete, because he's Pete
(I would so move to Prague, and I don't even need emotional devastation to do so. Honestly, the main impetus for picking this book was that city. I have a minor obsession with it.)
Tee spends most of the book in his own head, obsessing over his parents' imploding marriage, his birth mother, and a beautiful, much-older woman named Katka, who just happens to be married to an artist he befriends named Pavel. The three of them, along with another Czech with the American name Rockefeller, chat lightly around the Velvet Revolution and drink.
What struck me most about this book was that while the prose is very elegant and at times almost lyrical, Tee never goes anywhere. He circles around his issues and his neighborhood, very often spelling out for the reader exactly how his story mirrors his father's, but he does next to nothing about it. At times it seemed like the whole novel was a written account by a disinterested third party, one who simply wrote what he saw as he saw it--the court reporter approach. I wanted more than that for Tee (and for Prague, dammit). There was a comment by Salesses in the afterword that seemed very telling to me: he mentions he worked on this book for a decade. That lyrical prose sometimes felt overworked, like he literally spent a decade writing and rewriting certain passages, struggling for a way through Tee's ennui.
Ultimately, I didn't find The Hundred-Year Flood to be rewarding, although I think Salesses could be a great writer. I'll be interested to see what he does next.
Title: The Hundred-Year Flood
Author: Matthew Salesses
Star Rating: 2 out of 3
Buy, Borrow, Skip: Skip
Bonus: A new photo of Pete, because he's Pete