Country Of Origin
A novel about a Chinese American family in San Francisco that centers on the tensions between generations, success, and belonging. It follows family life and social pressure in equal measure.
Work Information
An urban novel about family and belonging.
Set around a Chinese American family in San Francisco, the novel explores immigrant experience, generational distance, and pressure to succeed. Urban texture and family drama overlap throughout.
Book Information
- Publisher
- W W Norton & Co Inc
- Published
- 2005-04-01
- Pages
- 315 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.22 x 2.29 x 21.08 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780393327069
- ISBN-10
- 039332706X
- Price
- 3632 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Mystery & Thrillers/Mystery
When a young American woman goes missing in 1980 Tokyo's sexual underworld, a young U.S. Embassy official considers his prospects for finding her and enlists the help of a neurotic and unpopular Japanese police officer. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 13,000 first printing.
Don Lee is the author of the novels The Collective , Wrack and Ruin , and Country of Origin , and the story collection Yellow . He has received an American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, an O. Henry Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Temple University and splits his time between Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Reviews
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My wife reports they are all good.
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COUNTRY OF ORIGIIN was a great read: a beautifully written story with considerable color of place and intriguing tension turns. I'm assigning it for my fiction writing class, it's that good. A rare find: one of those packages you get from Amazon.com that offer you a stimulating week--no stop reading once I started.
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I bought this book after listening to a piece about it on NPR. While clearly a proven writer, Don Lee falls short of creating spellbinding drama. The book serves as an interesting vehicle for Lee to comment on Japanese society in particular and our whole societal hangups about race, ethnicity and nationality in general. Certainly, the book will cause you to reflect on these issues. Lee succeeds in conveying a real sense of 1980 Japanese culture (I presume, based upon his personal experience and research, it is objectively accurate); however, I found his character arcs weak, his story disjointed, and his dramatic conflict lacking. The book never achieves a page turning crescendo, there is no climax, and the denouement is a fizzle. Maybe it's just too cerebral for me. Please pass me the Grisham.
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One of the worst books I have struggled to read in many, many years. Got all the way through it simply because I thought there must be SOMETHING at the end to clean up the mess. There wasn't.
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Rarely do I bail out on a book. Even if I don't like it at first, I still give it a chance to gather momentum and redeem itself. This one didn't redeem itself. I bailed.