It took me nine weeks and three recalls from the library to finish Susan Choi’s Flashlight and it’s my fault, I know. My excuses are feeble – how many times can I claim divorce as a distraction from fiction? just the once? lol – and made more pathetic by the quality of the book, which is: excellent.
There is the beautiful writing – and it is – and the core mystery of the book that begins with what happens to the father and continues throughout – but there is, more, the depth of the characters. A great ability to hold a character over a lifetime – from child to aging adult – and make moments of their development and change feel neither forced or inevitable, instead the ways we choose our life in scenes of deliberate (in)action.
You want more of a plot description? Fine, fine. Serk – the dad – and 10 year old Louisa are out on the beach in Japan (despite Serk hating the water, but these are the sacrifices we make for our children). Next thing we know Louisa is washed up on shore, Serk is gone (presumed dead) and Louisa attatches herself to a memory of a flashlight.
Then back and forth we go through space and time – to Serk’s childhood in Japan to a family in postwar North Korea to Louisa’s mother, Anne, and her choice to give up her son Tobias before marrying Serk and the kind of kid Tobias is and how they all fit together in bits of part truths and a lot of Things That Go Unsaid.
It’s a book about memory – those that are real, those we invent, those we wish we could forget, those we didn’t know we had until something (a song, a smell) finds them for us – and a book about how and why we hope.
And so with that – here’s hoping this was a blocker book – the kind so rich it held me for literal months – but now complete I can with a rush read all the many, many books mounting around me in my ceaseless aspiration to be 25 again and doing nothing all summer but reading. Alas.
I’m not actually sure if I should suggest this one for your summer reading list given how long it took me to finish. But you, dear reader, are better focused and better energized than I. So read. So read.
Literary Vice 