Chang-rae Lee

Henry Park, a Korean-American private spy, is challenged by a new assignment to investigate a rising politician, but the secrets he uncovers threaten his cultural identity and his relationship with his wife. Reprint.

Native Speaker

Recommended by a friend, borrowed from the public library (-:

The genre is a bit different from the ones I usually explore/am drawn to but interestingly enough, I still found the story engaging.

I am writing this review a year or so after finishing (because I’ve only recently made a space here) but I have a lone, short remark about this book, kept in my Notes app—most likely written in the midst of reading it:

“Native Speaker, Lee Chang-rae (pg. 197-214)

This reads more like lengthy journal entries than a fictional novel. It gets so intimate at times I feel like I’m accidentally eavesdropping on a conversation I can’t help but keep listening to; accidentally invading the characters’ spaces I can’t help but keep occupying.”

frances

Recommended by a friend, borrowed from the public library (-:

The genre is a bit different from the ones I usually explore/am drawn to but interestingly enough, I still found the story engaging.

I am writing this review a year or so after finishing (because I’ve only recently made a space here) but I have a lone, short remark about this book, kept in my Notes app—most likely written in the midst of reading it:

“Native Speaker, Lee Chang-rae (pg. 197-214)

This reads more like lengthy journal entries than a fictional novel. It gets so intimate at times I feel like I’m accidentally eavesdropping on a conversation I can’t help but keep listening to; accidentally invading the characters’ spaces I can’t help but keep occupying.”

Faith Ho 

** spoiler alert **
           **Native Speaker: A Soliloquy of Self as Symbol & Stranger** 

The story follows Henry Park, a second generation Korean-American spy. The bulk of the novel is focused on his own personal life (struggles with the family he created with his wife, the influence of his father) and his job as a spy on a prominent Korean politician in America, John Kwang. 

Much like John Kwang is “representative, easily drawn and iconic, the idea being if you know him you can know a whole people”, Henry too is a symbol, his reminisciences on his own condition as an “alien” (as his white wife says) in America the story of an entire diaspora even as it is his own. Political tensions are picked apart, “yellow against black”, “white against black”, “white and yellow” through his eyes, and we get the sense of a forever observer, standing at the uncertain precipice between viewing from a distance and being intimately involved. The novel weaves in such parallels, like his mishap in a mission with a Filippino psychiatrist where he observes and yet weaves his responses with bits of his true self, losing sight of his job—we see a sort of unravelling of Henry, his emotional and psychological simultaneous distance and nearness. 

In many senses too, this novel is beyond an exploration of the diasporic condition, this sense of alienation and “strangeness”—it is also a moving portrait of a man. Beyond his ethnic identity, there is a real sense and build of a person, with touching meditations on grief, love, pain—a human experience. It is written with prose neither simplistic nor elaborate, but a lucidity and precision of expression. 

Native Speaker is a deeply emotive and simultaneously socio-politically astute novel. It reminds me of something I once heard, that it is by telling the most personal stories that you can relate the most globally. 

The novel begins with Henry's wife leaving him, and the list she leaves behind describing who he is. These labels echo throughout the novel, whether explicitly or not, as he negotiates with his idea of selfhood. I get the sense that, written in first person, Native Speaker is his letter of response, both to the world, and to himself.

Representing the letter “L” in a series of twenty-six collectible editions, this award-winning novel describes the isolation felt by industrial spy Henry Park, a first-generation Korean American, who doesn't feel thoroughly at home in either culture anymore.

iia w

Not a terrible book whatsoever, I just didn't enjoy it that much. Good writing, felt for the characters. I just didn't like the plot.

Mahasin S Ameen

I take the ugh back, while I wasn't fond of this book, it was well written and the character does change enough that you don't wish he got hit by a bus any longer.

Elise

The debut novel from critically-acclaimed and New York Times–bestselling author of On Such a Full Sea and My Year Abroad. In Native Speaker, author Chang-rae Lee introduces readers to Henry Park. Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American—a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away. Park's harsh Korean upbringing has taught him to hide his emotions, to remember everything he learns, and most of all to feel an overwhelming sense of alienation. In other words, it has shaped him as a natural spy. But the very attributes that help him to excel in his profession put a strain on his marriage to his American wife and stand in the way of his coming to terms with his young son's death. When he is assigned to spy on a rising Korean-American politician, his very identity is tested, and he must figure out who he is amid not only the conflicts within himself but also within the ethnic and political tensions of the New York City streets. Native Speaker is a story of cultural alienation. It is about fathers and sons, about the desire to connect with the world rather than stand apart from it, about loyalty and betrayal, about the alien in all of us and who we finally are.

Native Speaker

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