"...No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind...Thinking? At last I have discovered it - thought; this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist - that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist...I am a thinking thing."
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy -
Second Meditation
The NYLS Book Review - Fiction
Title: Lost Men
Author: Brian Leung
ISBN: 9780307351647
Format: Hardcover, 304pp
Pub. Date: June 2007
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group; $23.00
Review:
It is said that to begin to know one’s self, one must first thoroughly understand one’s parents. I wonder.
In Leung’s Lost Men Westin Chan – the sad, contemplative protagonist – finds that in his mid-thirties he still wrestles with his father’s abandonment of him as a child. The re-appearance of this enigmatic personality of whom he knows little of and who now wants to take him to China (no doubt to reveal some painful secret while in the land of Westin’s youth) brings no comfort or closure as might be reasonably expected.
Loss seems to be the dominant specter in this work. In its shadow the trepidation of impending loss and the reverberations of failed relationships hide. Westin’s inner monologues echo these reverberations without annotation he can later use, signaling to the reader in subtext that this character will endlessly “round-a-bout” these meditations ensuring for himself a life of unrelenting misery and loneliness.
While Lost Men is said not to be autobiographical, Leung’s voice in the work can easily convince otherwise: such is the nature of talent. Though not a weighty work of literary fiction, readers desiring something with a bit more substance than the marketplace’s current offerings and an avenue for introspection may find it here. Leung, it appears, has made an auspicious beginning.
© Joel Glenn, Book Critic –The NYLS Book Review, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.