Flashlight by Susan Choi: a stellar auhor with a significant and influential voice

The last that ten-year-old Louise remembers of her father, is walking with him on a Japanese beach, looking at the stars. Perhaps they were swept out to sea by a huge wave––she can't recall––but she is found half-drowned, while there is no sign of Serk. He is declared dead and his wife and child go back to the US.

Louisa and her mother were born in America, while Serk emigrated from Japan as a bright young man, and worked in academia in Michigan, until taking a university secondment to Japan with his family. There, the two adults in Louisa's life become mysterious. Serk often takes his daughter with him to visit 'a friend'...an oriental woman who lives near the coast. Anne, her mother, loathes Japan and sleeps most of the day, hardly ever leaving the apartment, and by the time they take a break on the coast, she cannot walk at all. 

Catherine Taylor, reviewing Flashlight in the Financial Times, describes the book as… a rich generational saga that teems with intelligence, curiosity and, in terms of reading, sheer pleasure. Flashlight is told over four generations and sweeps the world; America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and most importantly North Korea. It moves from after the second world war to the twenty-first century, taking you along on an emotional flight that left me crying out at the end of the book, but also, there is a learning journey. Before the end of chapter one, I'd pulled out my atlas, and my historical atlas, to look at Japan and the Korean peninsular, and checked the history of North Korea online. Thus armed, it all began to make a deeply disturbing, utterly gripping sense, an important story, related with courage and stupendous language control, where flashlights are solid, important objects and a metaphor for lighting up a dark corner of recent history.

Courtesy of Wikipedia 
Choi at the 2019 Texas Book Festival

Beejay Silcox, in the Guardian, says: Choi is one of contemporary literature’s great demolition artists, and her emotional foundations hold. She can build as well as she detonates.  You may feel like that, if you take up this challenge: demolished…detonated. Susan Chio recently talked about the books she loves in The Guardian: I read Bleak House for the first time during the pandemic – it was one of the great reading experiences of my life. I'd already understood this, because the book reads as a deeply Dickensian investigation into the lives of people thrown into turmoil. She also cites Woolf and James as influences, something that emerges in her beautifully constructed, elongated paragraphs. 

Steadily, as Louisa grows from child to teen to middle aged adult, Choi reveals the mysteries she has set up, and as she does this we learn a little-known but shocking aspect of Japanese-Korean history. This might have been clumsily done in another writer’s hands, but Choi already ‘has us’––we are deeply invested in the story of Serk’s malfunctioning family, and however inscrutable he seemed in the early chapters, it is truly shocking to discover just what is happening to him in the later ones. 

One of the labels I use, to help my blog readers navigate my posts, is ‘Stellar Authors’. So this writer joins other ‘Stellar Authors’ such as Henry James, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Salmon Rushdie and Herman Melville. She deserves her place; as Beejay Silcox reminds us…Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger. 

That perfectly sums up what you will find yourself diving into if you swim through the waves and into the deep of this book.