Matthew Salesses’ debut novel The Hundred Year Flood is a lyrical adventure through the streets of Prague. Young Korean American Tee at the center of everything, as he tries to reinvent himself and separate himself from his adopted parents and the apparently destructive cycle of his adopted father. He escapes to Prague following his uncle’s suicide and 9/11 hoping to shed the past. His struggles and exploits are detailed in a beautifully transient way, as the writing pulls you closer and closer to the oncoming once-in-a-hundred-years flood. Tee befriends a revolutionary artist and his wife, among other characters, in Prague, but his actions and reactions drive the story forward, all twisted in with a bit of mysticism.
I’ve put off writing this review for a few days in part because I’m still processing, probably will still be processing for a second-go-around read. And that, I feel, is a sign of a strong novel, the kind that grabs on and is confusing and real and many other things. It is both light yet complex, stirring yet sparse in just over two hundred pages. But the chapters breeze by before you realize how caught up you are, not so much in the plot, as in the writing and the emotions.
