Indeed, Parfit comes across in the book as someone who would follow logic where it led, whether it was with or against the currents of contemporary culture. Perhaps he was hesitant to explain Parfit’s conclusions as anything other than the result of ingenious argumentation. Separately, Edmonds mentions Parfit’s aphantasia, a condition of incapacity to generate mental images that also seems, Edmonds notes, to be linked with a weak sense of connection to one’s past, but he doesn’t draw out the connection between Parfit’s life and his thinking. The characters faced adversity but ploughed on regardless. I liked that Lee’s portrayal of the family was not depressing. It is currently being adapted for television by Apple TV. Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a New York Times bestseller and was included on over 75 best books of the year lists. The poverty and hardship and what they had to endure to survive was very realistic and set the tone for the book. Min Jin Lee is the bestselling author of two novels.

Though he was professionally competitive - cutthroat, even, Edmonds suggests - those instincts did not extend to his romantic life, in which he appears to have been a kind of proto-polyamorist in the ’70s, another instance of porous borders. From the first page, you are transported into the of lives of the main character’s family. He was, in other ways, too, clearly a product of his era. His first paper, the barnburner “Personal Identity,” came in 1971 its claims that persons are always shading into new identities and that they have deeper connections to each other than they might realize seem appropriate to the hippie heyday. In some ways, Parfit’s work was of his times, and “Parfit” draws out those connections, perhaps without discussing them as explicitly as a reader might like.

Pachinko reviews book