Matthew SalessesRecensioni

In this fictional look at celebrity, sports and navigating it all while your are an Asian American, THE SENSE OF WONDER, by Matthew Salesses, the reader meets Won Lee. Won has fought his way, through lots of unwarranted dismissals and narrow-minded assumptions, into the NBA. When a opportunity presents itself, Won embraces it and makes enough of a impression that he then has figure out what to do when he can't maintain that moment when he is on top of the world.
Salesses does a good job of considering different perspectives when looking at the sudden celebrity of Won and what happens next. Won's life intertwines with the superstar whose home life is in shambles, the journalist who befriends Won but also carries passive resentment that Won got things he never did and his romantic interest that tries to keep him grounded when he lets his public persona become more than who he really is. The reader can feel Won grappling with the right decisions every step of the way. Just as in real life, the book does a excellent job showing that there aren't any decisions that are completely right or completely wrong.
While there were a couple of subplots that I wanted a little less of, I really enjoyed THE SENSE OF WONDER. I received this book as part of the Goodreads Giveaway program.

I've come across dozens of novels about young American men floundering for identity in Prague, and when I read them it's with deep reservations. These are the very people I avoided at all cost in their bookstore and bagel shop, with their trust funds and Lit degrees, treating a whole nation like the backdrop for their personal success story. Of course there's the draw, the backstory of someone I gave directions to, bought a book from, carefully shepherded out of a bar they were too drunk to realize they weren't welcome in.

This particular book is so amazingly typical with every trope of this specific genre, but it's also something else. The story is centered in Tee's inner life, and could really take place anywhere. That aspect is interesting, sometimes well-written, and kept me reading. The story of Prague feels like an overlay of every expat, and frankly I'd rather hear stories from the very real people of Karlín who lost so much, or the people who suffered in the floods of '97 and '99, or the astounding tale of the evacuated zoo, or the scientists and activists working to revitalize the Vltava and restore the floodplain to stop these ever-increasing "100-year floods."

Where does that leave me? I know, there's no zealot like a convert, but I still feel protective of Czechs' opportunities to tell their own stories. So as a 20-something American man's coming of age, this is quite good; as a book of Prague, it's depressingly familiar.

This novel has two main stories, each told by a first-person narrator. The first is Won Lee, a Korean basketball player for the NY Knicks, the only Asian in the NBA. The other narrator is Carrie Kang, a K-drama producer, and Won's girlfriend. Won and Carrie feel underappreciated and are victims of bias in their respective worlds. Additionally, there is much competition and drama between the two main characters and among the supporting characters, which include the star player on the Knicks, Paul Burton, known as Powerball!, and Robert Sung, a Korean-American ESPN journalist.

None of the primary characters felt a sense of belonging in the roles they chose as careers. All suffered insecurities that manifested in different ways; each wanted to fit in or play life differently. Since insight into the players' thoughts and motivations is prevalent in the book, it has been described as "meta." I think this novel is also supposed to be a fictional "real-life" Korean television drama, K-drama. The tropes common to K-dramas are friendship, family values, and love, blending traditional Confucian with Western materialism and individualism. The Sense of Wonder includes text describing K-drama as portraying the tension between certainty and wonder. The K-drama story within the story and the main plot forces us to consider what is real and imagined by describing uncertainty and using the title significance of the word wonder in various contexts.

Salesses has said that K-dramas are more true-to-life than American TV. He wrote this novel based on parts of his life story, and he emphasizes the themes that are important for him to convey:
-adoption
-seemingly invisibility of Asian Americans
-racism demonstrated against Asians in the USA
-fate
-frame of reference
-characters being outsiders in everyday situations
-power structures in the USA and abroad
-societal expectations, tokenizing
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I was initially surprised by the focus on cultural differences and the idea that story telling is almost always judged from a white, straight male perspective. But he made a compelling case and his passing examples of different literary traditions that structure stories differently was intriguing. In the second half he talks more about the structure of stories and discusses organizing workshops to help the author paticipants.

How pretentious. How bitter and reductive.

It's all so unfair according to this guy who has been in an English department his whole life.

This provides little help for writers, but makes a very grad student argument that "the system is so messed up." If you went to graduate school for humanities or arts, you'll remember hearing this exact same rant from someone who just discovered Foucault or Said. It was a fresh take thirty or forty years ago.½

Wow.

This book is eye-opening. I run a writer's group that until now I did not even realize, is loosely based on the Iowa Writer's Workshop model. I have run or been a part of the leadership for several writer's groups over the last 15 years. I am also a cis, straight, white male who comes to pursuing writing a little late in life. I am saying that I come to the avocation with a certain point of view on craft. I like to believe I am open-minded and believe in social justice for everyone. This book opened my eyes to assumptions built into the writing (and learning to write) process that I have never considered. That probably seems obvious to some of the people who read this, but not all.

I have given this book a thorough read through. However, this book is going to be a touchstone and a reference for a long time. I am keeping it close and I am already looking at ways to incorporate the syllabus and exercises into our group's process.

The only other thing to add here is a hearty thank you to Mathew Salesses for writing this book.

One of the most thought-provoking books I have read on craft and on teaching. I will certainly go back to this again.

Interesting interrogation of Western writing and workshops, particularly the Iowa Writers Workshop-style mainstream literary kind, and the difficulties and blindspots that can occur in it. Rather enjoyed it, even if that's not my main interest (hello, genre!). Lots to think about, and has a number of exercises at the end.

This is an interesting read for a very (to me at least) limited audience: those who teach writing. It says it’s meant for writers too, but I didn’t see as much there for them except the exercises at the end.

My only workshop (here it’s used as a verb) experience was an intro to creative writing class in undergrad which wasn’t fun but was manageable; the descriptions here of them sound horrendous to me. What I’m taking away from this read is that workshops aren’t that great for writers, but here are tips for teachers on how to have a better workshop. They seem to cancel each other out.

Some good literary fiction, set amongst Prague and the big floods, talking about being different, the wrong woman, love, family and fitting in.

The “100 Year Flood” was my Kindle First selection for August, based on the generally positive reviews. It’s the story of an Asian American 20 something named Tee, who goes to Prague after the suicide of his uncle. The entire story is a reflective piece from Tee’s perspective. It starts out in the here and now, and then goes back to embellish the reasons as to why Tee is in the hospital.

I went back and forth on enjoying the author’s sometimes prosaic style; sometimes I liked it and sometimes I didn’t. Salesses is good at creating an insight into a place I have never read about before. Through Tee’s eyes, Prague is beautiful, sensual, and vibrant. It’s a place of self-discovery and sadness, of life and darkness, and Salesses captured all of the nuances and vibrancy very well. Some of the writing is fuzzy and disjointed, but that is because Tee is fuzzy and disjointed.

All in all, I was able to read through the book without any issues as it wasn’t a very dense or difficult read. It was always easy for me to stop reading because nothing was able to keep me going through the night with interest, but it wasn’t so boring that I stopped reading and couldn’t find the energy to pick it back up.

The crux of the problem was that I just did not care for or about any of the characters. Even Tee was just the median, serving as the narrator of the story and nothing more. The storyline was also relatively predictable. I was able to come up with a lot of conclusions about the plot without any real deductions necessary.

That being sad, the book was well-written and had its points of intrigue. Since it was definitely on the slimmer side, I wouldn’t be opposed to picking it back up again someday and re-reading it.

I had high hopes for this book because it was blurbed by Roxane Gay, and indeed, it's written beautifully. Salesses knows his way around a sentence. Unfortunately, this book is all MFA workshop and no substance. Salesses knows how to say things but has nothing to say, placing this book squarely in the category of entitled male MFA mostly-autobiographical literary fiction (see for instance Eric Fassnacht, the 2015 incarnation of 2016 Salesses). I'd read more from this author if he had something new to say.

It's 1985 and Teddy, a 9 year old Korean boy, moves with his adoptive American parents from Conneticut to Seoul, as his father will be working at the university.
Teddy doesn't know a lot about his real parents, in fact all he knows, is the name of his real mother, Jung Eun-hee. Being now in Korea, he often imagines, what it would be like to meet her and finds himself looking at other students, who might resemble him and could be an older brother or sister. Two month after their arrival in Seoul his father brings home a colleague in the evening. She is introduced as Mrs. Kim.
Teddy feels there is more to Mrs. Kim, than his parents are willing to admit and he would like to spend more time with her, but his adoptive mother isn't keen on Mrs. Kim or her visits and the boy is confused by it.
Eventually an outing is agreed upon and the three of them, boy, adoptive mother and Mrs. Kim, embark on a trip to the national park. The day will result in a revelation, which certainly the boy will remember for the rest of his life.

The author, who has been adopted himself, brings the boy's feelings and thoughts excellently across. I can only imagine, that the "How could you leave me?" must haunt every child at some point in their lives, who has been handed over for adoption by their real mother/parents.
But for me it's the revelation of his adoptive mother at the end of the story which made my skin crawl and I don't think, I will forget this short for quite a while.
First class storytelling.