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Sep. 20th, 2008 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI read Susan Choi's The Foreign Student because of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
schiarire's recommendation, and specifically a comment wherein she called this a novel of third things. I like third things - I attempted to frame my thesis around third things, though I don't think I quite succeeded - and so I went in search.
Having just finished it, I would second both the recommendation and the description. By third things, I mean the things that exist a.) outside of what is commonly thought of in binary terms or b.) when two things come together to create a surprising new thing, and the book, I think, is about both. The story follows two characters very closely - Chang, a young Korean man on scholarship at a Southern university after acting as a translator during the Korean war, and Katherine, who cut herself off from her wealthy Southern family after her mother discovered her affair with a University professor. I found the Chang-perspective parts about 20x more interesting than the Katherine-perspective parts, but that is possibly because the Story of the Young Girl who is Sleeping with the Brilliant but Emotionally Unsatisfying Older Man is a story I have read before and am bored by; Chang's story is not a story I have read before, or at least not told in this way and with this level of depth and prose. Also I think Chang gets mostly all the best moments of thoughtfulness on language and math and memory. Sorry, Katherine. I did love Katherine's mother Glee a whole lot.
One of my favorite moments is the part when Chang is riding on a bus next to a child, and the child, who gets carsick when reading on the bus, asks Chang to read his (typical 1950's GI Joe-type) comic out loud to him while describing the images. This is not a moment that sums up the book, but it is an excellent example of the kind of work that Choi does with translation, and Chang's experiences in America, and third things.
schiarire's recommendation, and specifically a comment wherein she called this a novel of third things. I like third things - I attempted to frame my thesis around third things, though I don't think I quite succeeded - and so I went in search.Having just finished it, I would second both the recommendation and the description. By third things, I mean the things that exist a.) outside of what is commonly thought of in binary terms or b.) when two things come together to create a surprising new thing, and the book, I think, is about both. The story follows two characters very closely - Chang, a young Korean man on scholarship at a Southern university after acting as a translator during the Korean war, and Katherine, who cut herself off from her wealthy Southern family after her mother discovered her affair with a University professor. I found the Chang-perspective parts about 20x more interesting than the Katherine-perspective parts, but that is possibly because the Story of the Young Girl who is Sleeping with the Brilliant but Emotionally Unsatisfying Older Man is a story I have read before and am bored by; Chang's story is not a story I have read before, or at least not told in this way and with this level of depth and prose. Also I think Chang gets mostly all the best moments of thoughtfulness on language and math and memory. Sorry, Katherine. I did love Katherine's mother Glee a whole lot.
One of my favorite moments is the part when Chang is riding on a bus next to a child, and the child, who gets carsick when reading on the bus, asks Chang to read his (typical 1950's GI Joe-type) comic out loud to him while describing the images. This is not a moment that sums up the book, but it is an excellent example of the kind of work that Choi does with translation, and Chang's experiences in America, and third things.
