The Burning Book

The following passage appears on page 450 of Chang Rae Lee’s 499-page novel The Surrendered, published in 2010:

He couldn’t help himself and had peered once more into the book. It was the same, except that the cloth of its cover had been burned away, its pages made brittle by the trauma. He noticed two inscriptions on the title page. The first, to Sylvie, he recognized from all those years before; the second was in a different hand, the ink newer: To Nicholas, my dearest wayfarer. May you find great treasures and riches. He was confused as to how June had come to possess it, whether it had been singed in the terrible fire, and how, if so, it had ever survived. But like a promise of ill reckoning, the scent of smoke that rose up from its binding quickly quashed his questions and he had pushed it back into his bag.¹

The reader, unlike Hector (the central “he” in this passage), is now capable of answering the questions the protagonist pushes aside while symbolically deciding to keep the mysterious object that does not belong to him in his bag. By then we have made our way through a long and dense novel that ambitiously brings together three different moments in time and have (hopefully) been able to bridge gaps, to silence our own puzzlement at time disruptions, and to fully understand what happened to whom and when. Before trying to make the plot as clear as possible and drawing from it elements indispensable for the pursuit of the present analysis, I would like to suggest that this type of factual understanding is not what matters most. The essentials are, first, that the book Hector is now holding is twice inscribed, which points to a double existence in the course of time; second, that its cover is burnt, which, as explicitly and surprisingly mentioned, bespeaks a “trauma” and a narrow escape from destruction; and last, that it smells of smoke—a totally unrealistic detail when one remembers that the accident in question took place some fifty-five years earlier. This scent, however, acquires symbolical relevance if one thinks of the permanent existence of trauma and the way the most extreme forms of suffering have a way of remaining here and now in a paradoxically everlasting present. Hence my somewhat paronomastic title, “The Burning Book,” which alludes to the biblical burning bush and the searing power of literature when it sets itself the task of representing suffering, that is, when it endeavors to transcend its inert ink-and-paper reality to acquire a metafictional flame that feeds upon itself to live on.

The first third of the novel—a little more, certainly, in terms of space—takes place during the Korean War in 1950. At the outset, eleven-year old June is traveling south with her two younger siblings on the top of a train car after her parents, elder brother, and sister have been respectively executed, raped and murdered, or taken away. When the train lurches to a halt, both smaller children are projected to the ground: the little girl dies on the spot, the boy has his leg cut off, and, in spite of all her efforts, June must abandon him when the train starts again.

As is made clear from this unsparing chapter, violence and ensuing suffering will be ever present in the novel and will become, for the reader as well as for June, an inescapable reality. It is perhaps one of the feats of this text to manage to provoke interest and empathy, rather than rejection and horror. Even at its cruelest peaks—the torture of a Chinese fighter for independence at the hands of occupying Japanese officers, or that inflicted upon an enemy Korean teenager by sadistic American soldiers—one is made to feel that nothing is gratuitous in a tableau that means to naturalistically and synecdochically encompass the awesome reality of wars. This strand of the plot features June’s encounter with the young gi Hector, who rescues her from thirst and hunger and places her in an orphanage where he...