Welcome to the official blog site of Sonya Chung, author of the novel
Long for This World.
Published by Scribner and available in stores and online now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, and e-reader.
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“An intricately structured and powerfully resonant portrait of lives lived at the crossroads of culture, and a family torn between the old world and the new, Long for This World marks a powerful debut from a young writer of great talent and promise.”
–Kate Walbert, National Book Award finalist and
author of A Short History of Women
21 January 2012
An exhibit at Tibor deNagy of Elizabeth Bishop‘s art — both her original art and art she collected — reminds me that the creative process is constant. Writing, painting, collecting too – these are all acts of seeing.
I love the inscription of “Happy Birthday” here – no one knows to whom Bishop wrote this, some speculate that she wrote/painted it for herself.
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43 King Street in NYC, where EB lived not too happily (for a year or so, I believe). She was never able to feel at home in New York. ”I’ve never felt particularly homeless, but, then, I’ve never felt particularly at home. I guess that’s about right for a poet’s sense of home.”
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EB did not have an easy life — she was adrift, suffered heartbreaks and isolation — but she made her own way, always finding ways to live where she wanted, and how she wanted (Maine, Key West, Brazil) — as an artist. A rare and beautiful thing.
16 January 2012
I worked through most of MLK day, but I did enjoy wandering the Studio Museum of Harlem for an hour or so. It’s a privilege to live in this neighborhood, to partake in its culture, present and past; and I forget it too easily.
I found this photograph utterly arresting and beautiful. I failed to photograph the plaque with the artist’s name, but I’m working on tracking it down.
Kira Lynn Harris‘s homage to Romare Bearden‘s “The Block,” part of the Romare Bearden Project, celebrating the centennial of his birth.
If you’re a New Yorker, be sure to make the trip uptown; if you’re an uptowner, be sure to get over to the Studio Museum sometime if you haven’t. It will be worth your while.
11 January 2012
Two things: an essay and a blog post.
My essay on James Salter, “In the Light Where Art and Longing Meet: My Day With James Salter,” is in the current print issue of Tin House Magazine. I couldn’t be more tickled. The project began almost exactly two years ago(!) — with my piece at The Millions (on sex writing by “great” male writers), a stunning email from JS himself, and an ensuing correspondence over the following year. Other amazing authors in this issue, themed “Beauty” — Marilynne Robinson, Michel Houellebecq, Eric Puchner, Paul Willems, Michelle Widgen, Aimee Bender on artist Amy Cutler, and more.
I also have a blog post, “Living and Learning in Bookstores,” as part of Tin House‘s “Book Clubbing” blog series — wherein I describe the independent bookstores in NYC that I love, and the unassuming bookstore in Seattle where I embarked on my literary education, many lifetimes (although really not that many years) ago. Enjoy!
10 January 2011
We’ve been obsessed with the Republican primaries and debates here. I suppose that means I’m not as cynical as I thought I was; I keep looking for candidates to break through with a true voice, to stray from pre-packaged message message message. Newt and Dr. Ron are the ones to watch in this respect, although John Huntsman showed signs of life on Sunday in NH.
Romney‘s electability strategy is clear: I’ve run businesses, I’ve lived “in the real economy,” that Obama guy hasn’t. Another strategy that I imagine the Romneyans will pursue might go like this: I’m a doer, not a hand-wringer, we need real-world action; this isn’t a time for “nuanced thinking,” for professorial passivity.
Ugh.
With the departure of Obama’s Chief of Staff Bill Daley, this dichotomy of character comes up again: Rahm Emanuel was a “ball-buster,” a guy who “got things done.” Again, he wasn’t known as a thinker, a ponderer, but rather a guy with a short fuse and sharp, goal-oriented focus. This is apparently what a good Chief of Staff needs to be, what Daley wasn’t (not enough, anyway).
But what about in the rest of life? I wonder often if we’re all destined to be one or the other, in a final-accounting-of-your-life sort of way, i.e. thinkers or doers. People of process or people of results. An obvious answer is, “Of course not.” Weirdly, the older I get, the more I think (in an unnuanced way), maybe so…
1 January 2012
Happy 2012, one and all.
Quote for the year: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Tancredi says this to his uncle in The Leopard. We understand that he is speaking of politics, class upheaval, a way of life in 1860 Sicily. For me, I think it has to do with aging (ugh). Those things that I would want to “stay as they are” have to do with youth — forward motion, energy, vision, curiosity of the soul, a developing mind. In order to preserve and nourish these, “things will have to change.”
Diet and exercise, yes. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “strategic spiritual self-nourishment.” Not exactly sure what I mean by that, but something to do with giving things the time they need, resisting the temptation to rush or cut bate or shortchange.
As for looking back, if you haven’t seen the Year in Pictures 2011 feature at the NY Times, it’s pretty amazing. Here’s hoping that Campaign 2012 doesn’t make a complete mockery of all that’s happened — what struggling people around the world have expressed — in 2011.
30 December 2011
My piece on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa‘s The Leopard is up today at The Millions.
I found it surprisingly difficult to write. I suppose that when a book strikes you dumb, when it’s doing so many beautiful wonderful things, it is very difficult to write about.
(Love this Italian book jacket)
What I didn’t include in the piece, because I couldn’t figure out how to do so without it seeming a non sequitur, is the fantastic dog character (Bendicò) who, it turns out, Lampedusa himself felt was “a vitally important character and practically the key to the novel.” The novel in fact closes with an image of Bendicò.
Speaking of which, stay tuned for my “Dogs of Buenos Aires” photo-post, coming up soon.
26 December 2011
Phew — made it.
Every year, during the month that starts at Thanksgiving and ends after Christmas, I feel like an undersized running back at the two yard line (deep in my own team’s territory), working my way down the field. I keep hoping that the quarterback will hail-mary us to the end zone in one gorgeous, painless swoop; but it ends up being more like piecemeal progress, fending off tackles, a little achey and bruisey.
There’s just too much expectation around these holidays. Some of which I feel unable to meet, some of which I am unwilling.
In a few days my homage to Giuseppe di Lampedusa‘s The Leopard will go up at The Millions; and in it I write about how much I sympathize, and even empathize, with Don Fabrizio, the novel’s middle-aged Sicilian protagonist, a Prince circa 1860 no less. What could I possibly have in common with the Prince of Salina during Italy’s Risorgimento? Well, principally this:
I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both.
My family life is not conventional enough to conform to holiday expectations; and I suppose I am not (yet) unconventional enough at heart to truly feel free from all those expectations.
Anyhoo — officially, we (if you happen to relate to this) can now come out of hiding. It is okay to be doing non-holiday things — like work, correspondence, etc — without seeming too much like a sad weirdo. Here is a bit of what we did on Dec 25, here in Buenos Aires, Argentina:
Parque de la Memoria (for The Disappeared) — “To Think/Contemplate is a Revolutionary Act”
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Kitschy Nativity Scene, outside Congreso
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Quiet subway platforms — a gathering of tourists mostly!
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Families fishing along the Rio de la Plata
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Football (soccer) stadium, River Plate Team, the rich team (think Yankees)
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In Once (OHNsay) – an immigrant neighborhood centered around a place called Plaza Miserere (yikes) that reminded me of Queens (and not really miserable at all)
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And what did we eat? Leftover Chinese takeout, sauteed gai-laan, leftover peach pie (homemade, by a lovely young expat who hosted us for Christmas eve dinner), and flan from the corner bakery. Whiskey and soda, cheap Malbec. Good stuff.
15 December 2011
Can I just say how much I love the siesta concept, here in Latin America (and many places around the world)?
I’m using mine to catch up on… well, to catch up on everything at this point, but at the moment, catch up on blogs and literary periodicals. From Claire Messud‘s review of Michael Ondaatje‘s new novel, The Cat’s Table:
In a rare, distinctly essayistic moment in his new novel, The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje articulates his position thus:
Recently I sat in on a master class given by the filmmaker Luc Dardenne. He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they: we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves…. I believe this. I recognize this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.
This view, almost an authorial ethics of representation, explains some aspects of Ondaatje’s literary style: his prose, while gorgeous, is on occasion quite oblique, and his narratives—as is true of The Cat’s Table—can be strikingly fragmented. (It is wonderful and, in these fundamentally homogenizing times, increasingly rare to encounter a writer who does not shape his art to a known and satisfying form, but instead fashions the form around his content.) His goal is to reach toward that elusive complex we might call experienced human reality, and in so doing, precisely to grant each of his characters his own wisdom and autonomy. In an Ondaatje novel, there is much that we do not directly know, much that we cannot know for certain.
I think often about what it means, in this current cultural moment, to be a “literary” writer; and if that terminology even matters anymore. There is a sense that it doesn’t; that it is an anachronistic, old fuddy-duddy kind of categorization; that you will die in dinosaur-like fashion if you hold too tightly to such high-art ideas. But something about Messud’s description of Ondaatje’s literary vision speaks to what I consider to be literary — to be art — in a way that matters. Uncertainty; unknowability; “experienced human reality” as elusive and complex; ultimately a reading experience that effects some discomfort and reminds us that life is a mysterious, unstreamlined business.
