On Such a Full Sea: A Novel Audio CD – Audiobook, Unabridged
Author: Chang-rae Lee ID: 1611762219
.com Review
An Best Book of the Month, January 2014: Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea is a fascinating read, in part due to the dueling instincts of the novel. The world-building is first-rate, but there is an overall feeling of allegory to the book. There is brutality in nearly every chapter, but Lee writes with such grace and skill that I often found myself just reading for the pleasure of his words. Set in a dystopian future America, where “New Chinese” have populated certain urban centers like Baltimore and Detroit, On Such a Full Sea is the story of Fan, a gifted diver who abandons the relative safety of her city to search for her disappeared boyfriend in the more lawless parts of the country. The story is narrated by a nameless voice from Baltimore (or B-Mor, as it is called in the novel), and that conceit allows the author to interject observations and commentary into the story that might otherwise seem phony. As we journey with the unassuming but strong-willed Fan, and as details are deftly revealed, Chang-Rae Lee succeeds in weaving a mesmerizing tale while revealing truths about such wide-ranging subjects as social stratification, technology, estrangement, and the reasons we tell stories. –Chris Schluep
–This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Lee (The Surrendered, 2010), always entrancing and delving, has taken fresh approaches to storytelling in each of his previous four novels, but he takes a truly radical leap in this wrenching yet poetic, philosophical, even mystical speculative odyssey. B-Mor is a rigorously ordered labor settlement founded in what used to be Baltimore by refugees from impossibly polluted New China. They grow stringently regulated food for the elite, who live in gated “charter” villages, surrounded by “open counties,” in which civilization has collapsed under the assaults of a pandemic and an ever-harsher climate. In a third-person plural narrative voice that perfectly embodies the brutal and wistful communities he portrays, Lee tells the mythic story of young, small, yet mighty Fan, a breath-held diver preternaturally at home among the farmed fish she tends to. When her boyfriend inexplicably disappears, Fan escapes from B-Mor to search for him, embarking on a daring, often surreal quest in a violent, blighted world. She encounters a taciturn healer bereft of all that he cherished, a troupe of backwoods acrobats, and a disturbing cloister of girls creating an intricate mural of their muffled lives. Lee brilliantly and wisely dramatizes class stratification and social disintegration, deprivation and sustenance both physical and psychic, reflecting, with rare acuity, on the evolution of legends and how, in the most hellish of circumstances, we rediscover the solace of art. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Literary best-seller Lee will reach an even larger readership with this electrifying postapocalyptic novel as he tours the country in conjunction with an all-points media and publicity drive. –Donna Seaman
–This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Audio CD: 10 pagesPublisher: Penguin Audio; Unabridged edition (January 7, 2014)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1611762219ISBN-13: 978-1611762211 Product Dimensions: 9 x 1.5 x 4 inches Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces Best Sellers Rank: #1,268,538 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #570 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Asian American #2908 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Dystopian #3691 in Books > Books on CD > Literature & Fiction > Unabridged
I’ve been a fan of Chang-rae Lee ever since reading his first book, Native Speaker. So even though speculative fiction isn’t really my thing, I wanted to read On Such a Full Sea, simply because of who wrote it.
In this book, Lee has a detailed a grim, dystopian future, clearly drawing on the major issues of our day–pollution, income inequality, disease, lack of opportunity and more. The world he has created is rigidly stratified, with the wealthy Charters at the top–those who have all the opportunities and wealth, those in self-contained labor settlements, formerly major U.S. cities, whose purpose is to provide the Charters with food, and those who must fend for themselves in the counties. The heroine, Fan, is from one of the labor settlements, B-Mor, which it quickly becomes apparent was once Baltimore. The labor settlements are populated by the descendants of the "originals," who were brought over from China. There is almost no upward mobility for anyone except the Charters; however, once in a while someone from the settlements, who does exceptionally well on tests, will be plucked away and placed in a Charter community, as Fan’s brother had been many years earlier.
Fan, at 16, is an exceptionally good diver, able to hold her breath longer than anyone and responsible for cleaning the fish tanks that produce seafood for the Charters. She’s in love with Reg, who works in the greenhouses. In Lee’s futuristic world, cancer (C-illness) is ubiquitous–everyone develops it at some point–except Reg, who for reasons unknown, seems to be impervious. One day, he disappears, and Fan does the unthinkable–she leaves B-Mor in search of him. The rest of the book is an account of her adventures, with people in the counties and the Charters.
Imagine us. We are sitting on a dying earth, but our contentedness precludes us from acknowledging it. We work near tirelessly, day in and out, for the course of our lives to remain steady, static. We live communally, but barely speak with each other. Our own corner of the world is all we know and all we’re encouraged to understand. Save for the rarest cases — fiery, untouchable brilliance, or the unexplained interest of a nebulous governing power — we have no social mobility. And above all, we do not question our state of affairs, save in idle commentary. For what would be the use?
This is a glimpse of the world of Chang-rae Lee’s ON SUCH A FULL SEA, a novel set in a future dystopia that seems, at first, a great departure for him. Yet, although Lee here takes his first crack at speculative fiction, he still preoccupies himself with those themes that have served him so well for so long — hope, will, betrayal, knowledge, regret — in a setting reflecting our own, only eerily, near-apocalyptically stretched.
The novel’s narrator is a collective one: an ever-shifting group of unnamed inhabitants of a fishing labor settlement called B-Mor (once Baltimore), founded by emigrants from New China, who left to escape the pollution destroying their countryside. B-Mors are members of the second-tier of a rigid, three-tier class system that stretches worldwide. Although the dwellers of such settlements are lower than the powerful, ambitious residents of the wealthy Charter villages, they remain safer and better off than the denizens of the vastly numerous surrounding counties.
The B-Mors tell, reflectively, the story of Fan, a gifted 16-year-old fish-tank diver whose world is shattered instantly when her lover, Reg, disappears one afternoon without a trace.
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