Why read A Gesture Life?

Book cover of A Gesture Life

Book description

Franklin Hata, Korean by birth but raised in Japan, is an outsider in American society, but he embodies the values of the town he calls his own - he is polite and keeps himself to himself. Franklin deflects everyone with courtesy and impenetrable decorum, and becomes a respected elder of…

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Historical fiction

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Why read it?

2 authors picked A Gesture Life as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Solveig Eggerz

Author

Hata, a Korean, adopted by a Japanese couple, serves the Japanese Army as a medic in World War II. His job is to care for enslaved Koreans who serve as “comfort women” to Japanese soldiers. His experiences are the material of nightmares. Years later he leads a deceptively quiet life in a small town in New Jersey with his Korean adoptive daughter. It is deceptively quiet because his unresolved war experiences, presented in flashbacks, haunt him. I admired the abrupt manner in which Chang-Rae Lee interrupted Hata’s uneventful life with horrific memories.

The author’s method felt like the triggering of…

From Solveig's list on The best books where characters don’t mingle much, talk funny, and bristle at the past.

Pietra Rivoli

Author

This is a novel that has stuck with me since I first read it more than 10 years ago. Doc Hata, the main character, has composed a life that is a series of gestures, never quite realizing – or does he? -- that his composition is not a life at all. Lee plumbs the depths of the human heart with astonishing restraint and delicacy. But the novel is also embedded in a globalization narrative: Doc Hata crosses the Pacific to a new life, leaving everything and nothing behind.

From Pietra's list on The best books on economics and globalization.