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A review by newbatteri
The Hundred-Year Flood by Matthew Salesses
5.0
[Taken from the Editor's Kindle First letter]
Matthew Salesses’s dreamlike debut is haunting and magical, roaming in and out of time and place. The Hundred-Year Flood transported me from Boston to Prague to a hospital to being underwater. I saw myself touching the statue of a saint for good luck and waiting for a flood that comes only once every hundred years. I grappled with Prague’s myths, ghosts, heroes. This is one of those books that I thought I was reading just for the wonderful story itself, until I stepped back and realized that throughout the narrative, the author has unfailingly and beautifully woven together the threads of identity.
We follow the protagonist, twenty-two-year-old Tee, as he navigates the bonds of personhood. The bond of living in two cities. The bond of being seen as American and foreign at the same time. The bond of being both white and Asian. The bond of individuality and of becoming your father. The bonds of love and lust and loyalty. While Tee tries hard to convince himself that living in a new place will forge a new identity, Salesses masterfully lays down the heart of the novel: that the imprint of family is permanent and never washes away.
I was overcome by the ease and the absolutely breathtaking way with which Salesses navigates the waters of self and home. Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State, calls the novel “epic and devastating and full of natural majesty,” and I couldn’t agree more.
Matthew Salesses’s dreamlike debut is haunting and magical, roaming in and out of time and place. The Hundred-Year Flood transported me from Boston to Prague to a hospital to being underwater. I saw myself touching the statue of a saint for good luck and waiting for a flood that comes only once every hundred years. I grappled with Prague’s myths, ghosts, heroes. This is one of those books that I thought I was reading just for the wonderful story itself, until I stepped back and realized that throughout the narrative, the author has unfailingly and beautifully woven together the threads of identity.
We follow the protagonist, twenty-two-year-old Tee, as he navigates the bonds of personhood. The bond of living in two cities. The bond of being seen as American and foreign at the same time. The bond of being both white and Asian. The bond of individuality and of becoming your father. The bonds of love and lust and loyalty. While Tee tries hard to convince himself that living in a new place will forge a new identity, Salesses masterfully lays down the heart of the novel: that the imprint of family is permanent and never washes away.
I was overcome by the ease and the absolutely breathtaking way with which Salesses navigates the waters of self and home. Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State, calls the novel “epic and devastating and full of natural majesty,” and I couldn’t agree more.