In college I had an English professor who had us do an interesting exercise on the first day of class. He gave everyone ten minutes to write down an idea for a story. Of course everyone was sweating. How the hell do you come up with a story in ten minutes? When time was up, he pointed at the first student. What's your story about, in one sentence? 

Uh, well, it's about a guy who goes to Nepal with his best friend--

Wrong, the professor cut the student off, shaking his head. Pointed at the next student.  

What's your story about, in one sentence?

It's about a girl who finds a time capsule buried in her grandfather's back yard--

Wrong.  

And so on. One after another we offered up, in increasingly succinct strokes, our ideas. One after another, we all failed the test. Eventually, the professor explained our error. He wasn't looking for a storyline. He was looking for a story. The right answer, he said, would sound something like this:

It's about what friendship can and can't survive.

or

It's about the ways in which families inherit love and loss.

I think about this exercise all the time. It may have been the single most important takeaway from my major. It has profoundly enriched both my own writing and my experience of literature. And applied to this novel, wow is it fun:

It's about a man learning the limits of his selfishness.

It's about how in the end, we become the people we didn't know we already were.

It's about a man breaking his own heart in order to understand love.

When I finished The Orphan Master's Son, I set it aside and spent a moment just being sad for a character I'd fallen in love with. Just aching in the melancholic grip of an ending I really, really, really did not want. But there was no other possible way. Ineluctable: that's the word for this novel's conclusion. I can't think of anything else I've ever read where the ending feels like it's happening both in slow motion and in triple time. Just incredible. This book is under my skin in the best way, and I'm so glad I read it slowly. It thickened inside me, in my brain and my heart, like a slow-cooking soup (if you've read it, you'll get the reference). Getting richer and ever more robust; giving me more and more to savor. 

interesting themes

Fate: why some people accept their fates and others do not.

Day vs. night and the motif of darkness (the sea, the tunnels, the prison mines).

Art in all forms: Gil's watercolors, the chest tattoos, the "biographies", Mangnan's photographs, Sun Moon's movies--even the Senator's wife's quilt.