The Winged Seed: A Remembrance by Li-Young Lee, a review

The book: Tortuous to get through

The author: Avoid at all cost

Review:

My book club had decided we would read The Winged Seed because it sounded like an intriguing concept: The author was reconciling himself to his father's death through retelling a number of stories from his life. The reality of this book was far different.

Li-Young Lee appears to speak fluent gibberish. He did indeed incorporate stories from his childhood and his father's life into the story, but they were interspersed with streams of consciousness that left me wondering whether he should be locked away in a padded room somewhere. Freud would have had a field day with a number of the scenarios. There were times when the father was described as a saintly man, yet the detailed abused heaped upon his son clearly demonstrated the lie behind that imagery. However, Li-Young Lee seems almost proud of those times. At one point, he mentions his father beating him simply to try and make him speak, and how he knew his father really only wanted to hear himself speak so he hoped to be beaten until his father had to give up in defeat. There's something seriously wrong with father-son relationships like that.

The author also threw sporadic curse words into the middle of random stories or trains of thought. My presumption is that it was to keep the reader awake. I can normally sit down and read a 200-ish page book in one sitting, but this one kept me struggling for days before I could finally say I finished it.

I detest writers who think they are more intelligent than their readers, and that was the perspective I had on this book. The only other writer I ever perceived in the same manner was James Joyce, and I at least thought Joyce was intelligent. This author did nothing to convince me that his gray matter is still present, and instead made me wonder whether he was covering up his own ineptitude and dysfunction with his style of writing.

I can honestly say that I will never read another book by Li-Young Lee again. That was three days' worth of my spare time that I want back.