A Gesture Life

by Chang-rae Lee

Paper Book, 1999

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Genres

Publication

New York : Riverhead Books, 1999.

DDC/MDS

813.54

813.54

Description

Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML: The second novel from the critically acclaimed New York Times�??bestselling author Chang-rae Lee. His remarkable debut novel was called "rapturous" (The New York Times Book Review), "revelatory" (Vogue), and "wholly innovative" (Kirkus Reviews). It was the recipient of six major awards, including the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. Now Chang-rae Lee has written a powerful and beautifully crafted second novel that leaves no doubt about the extraordinary depth and range of his talent. A Gesture Life is the story of a proper man, an upstanding citizen who has come to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his boundaries and to make his neighbors comfortable in his presence. Yet as his story unfolds, precipitated by the small events surrounding him, we see his life begin to unravel. Gradually we learn the mystery that has shaped the core of his being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean Comfort Woman when he served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II. In A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee leads us with dazzling control through a taut, suspenseful story about love, family, and community�??and the secrets we harbor. As in Native Speaker, he writes of the ways outsiders conform in order to survive and the price they pay for doing so. It is a haunting, breathtaking display of talent by an acclaimed young author… (more)

Media reviews

The New York Times Book Review

In ''Native Speaker'' Lee displayed an admirable, lyrical restraint in the face of an emotional subject: the difficult and sometimes perilous process of becoming an American, and staying one, with the losses and gains that such a battle for identity entails. ''A Gesture Life'' is even more of an

achievement. It's a beautiful, solitary, remarkably tender book that reveals the shadows that fall constantly from the past, the ones that move darkly on the lawns of the here and now.

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The New York Times

Lee lays out these events in precise, elliptical prose that echoes Hata's own fastidious detachment. He conjures up, with equal authority, the brutal, acrid world of Hata's wartime service and the bucolic, Cheeveresque world of Bedley Run, using small, telling details to suggest each realm's

complicated rules of social engagement. At the same time he allows the reader to see why Hata remains an outsider in both places: always trying too hard to fit in, always trying too hard to say the right thing.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member Eurydice

An elegant portrayal of the devastation wreaked by war, even in lives whose surface remains placid.

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LibraryThing member TigsW

This was a beautifully written book. Though the theme was grey and took a long time to play out I just could not put the book down. The main character, Franklin Hata, a Korean raised by foster Japanese parents never manages during his life to connect with his emotions, undoubtedly because of some

combination of cultural factors (the reserve and subjugation encouraged by Japanese culture at that time) and the devastating events that spot his life. He remains apparently detached from significant emotional events, but the book shows in writing about his inner thinking about these events that he is actually deeply affected, but he fails to express this because his response is always moderated by what are probably wrongly conceived notions of others' needs. A beatuful and exquisitly written book.

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LibraryThing member TPLThing

Chang-rae Lee's 1999 novel had been recommended to me several times over the past several years and it was just a matter of time before I read it. I was not disappointed. Multi-layered, it initially is about a Japanese man, Doc Hata, who lives a very ordinary life in a small town in New England. Of

course, that's only the surface and little by little you learn that much has happened in his recent as well as distant past--an adopted daughter from whom he is estranged and horrific incidents during WWII to name a few. This one will stay with you long after you turn the last page.

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LibraryThing member LB121100

Don't read this book if you don't like deep novels. This one makes you go very deep into the characters and it is sometimes disturbing. I thought it was a wonderful story and very well-written.

LibraryThing member bfolds

Quiet, beautiful book that sneaks up on you. Beautiful language, very deft creation of a sense of place.

LibraryThing member maiamaia

I felt like I hadn't properly understood it, as if i should read it again. Superficially straightforward though. The detached writing style I normally hate about American writing is innate to the subject. Not simple and enjoyable like Native Speaker, and not genre either. Apart from sending

everyone to hospital at the end, very beliveable, and understandable: honest. Underrated writer.

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LibraryThing member KWoman

Started out somewhat interesting, but lost me immediately. Was never able to regain any interest at all.

LibraryThing member gilporat

The language and writing is beautiful.

LibraryThing member Limelite

Lee delivers a disturbing examination of a Korean-born Japanese man who, when a soldier in the Japanese army, falls in love with a comfort-woman. Brutality of that flashback life contrasts with the sedate propriety of Franklin Hata’s upper middle-class Cheeveresque existence. Everything is

proper, everything is maintained in order for Hata to fit in. Except the outside fitting-in Hata is in stark contrast to the closed off internal man who has lost the love his daughter and in a Chekovian manner, cannot declare his love for Mary Burns who swims in his pool every Sunday but has no chance of being included beyond that.

The title comes from Sunny, Doc Hata’s adopted daughter, who accuses her father of living an empty life, devoted to the maintenance of standard conventions, filled with empty gestures that do nothing to commit the inner man emotionally to anyone.

By the end of the novel, when events force Hata to re-evaluate himself upon Sunny’s unexpected return with her son, Hata takes bold steps that leave some hope for his emotional redemption, but not much.

Lee’s tone in this novel is restrained, quiet, and emotionally dry, reflecting his narrator’s personality. The details are small and telling as the details of decoration in a classic Japanese home. Lee creates a novel whose action sprawls across two continents and decades of time, but seems to take place in no greater space than a single room in a matter of days, which is practically the case of the “real” setting and time. Claustrophobic atmosphere, artistic prose, deeply flawed hero, explosive secrets combine to equal an excellent read.

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LibraryThing member juniperSun

A slow, introspective book. "Doc" Hata, post-retirement, evaluates his relationship with his adopted daughter and with a now-deceased lover. It is only slowly that his experiences in WWII are revealed, and it is up to us to ponder how they have affected these subsequent relationships.
In some sense,

it confirms my opinion of Japanese as being very concerned with maintaining right relations with community, of meeting one's duty, of self abnegation before offending others.

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LibraryThing member SeriousGrace

A Gesture Life is the elegant story of Franklin "Doc" Hata, a Japanese man living in suburban New York. He is a proper man quietly living out his days after retiring from the medical supply business. He has a beautiful house and garden and what appears to be a calm life. Everyone respects him, but

no one really knows him. As we delve deeper into his history we learn of many rippling disturbances. We discover an adoptive daughter, mysteriously estranged from Hata, with a child of her own. We learn of a relationship with a widow who he cared for deeply but to whom he couldn't quite commit. We don't even fully understand how close they became or why they drifted apart. Through Hata's memories we revisit World War II and his position as medic in Rangoon. We watch the unfolding and blossoming of a relationship with "K" a comfort woman; a relationship that ends in tragedy, as most wartime relationships do. In the end, it's Hata's relationship with daughter, Sunny, that is the most compelling. Theirs is a deep and complicated bond.

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LibraryThing member tshrope

Chang-rae Lee is an amazing writer. I can’t remember the last time I read writing this good from a Contemporary writer, his prose are beautiful. The story itself is rather secondary to the writing, and honestly in a lesser writer’s hands I would have stopped reading it. The story line is

basically two-fold, Franklin Hata’s experience as a Japanese military field medic during WWII where he falls in love with a Korean Comfort woman, and his life in an upper middle-class NY suburb after the war. The story lines are rather depressing and not particularly compelling. I can see why some people have said in reviews that it is boring, and disjointed, but he does such a wonderful job of getting in the skin of Franklin Hata that he pulls you into the character makes you feel Hata’s own quiet desperation.

Lee explores many themes in this book, identity (racial and social), what makes up a life?-is it one that you set up as a window display, or is it one that you actually live and experience without thought of the consequences, and of course it is about relationships; father-daughter, friendships, and romantic love.

I would recommend this book to people who enjoy reading excellent writing, and it would make a good book club selection to explore and discuss the many themes and Hata’s character. This is a book that will no be everyone’s cup of tea though.

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LibraryThing member SqueakyChu

“Doc” Hata recently retired from his occupation as the owner of a medical supply store. He has never married and his adopted teenage daughter Sunny has left home. Reflecting back upon his life as a Japanese immigrant of Korean ethnicity living in the United States, he feels he has achieved a

high status and is well respected in his community of Bedley Run. However, demons of his past, including a forbidden love, failure to marry, and an unsatisfactory relationship with his adopted daughter, often surface in thoughts of his life both in Japan and the United States.

In The Gesture Life, the author provides a thought-provoking examination of how one Oriental man conducts his life in order to be accepted and deemed “proper” by others of his community. Parts of the story seem a bit hard to follow because of movement back and forth in time, occasional significant scenes too sketchily described, and lack of important history (especially Sunny’s childhood). Nevertheless, the novel succeeds in its beautiful use of language and ability to evoke a wide range of emotions as it poignantly examines one man’s feelings. It is an attention-getting, fascinating story, especially about the comfort girls of the Imperial Red Army during World War II. The novel makes a major contribution to American literature about the Asian immigrant

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LibraryThing member kslade

Good senstive story of family and life and buried secrets from a war.

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