I have to admit I was a little disappointed. This collection features 25 stories from some of Korea’s most renowned | |
I have to admit I was a little disappointed. This collection features 25 stories from some of Korea’s most renowned authors—including Yi Munyol and Kyung-sook Shin—which spans a century’s worth of publications. The works were carefully curated from thousands of potential stories and the resulting collection paints an exquisite portrait of South Korea from the beginning of Japanese colonization through the Korean War to the new millennium…and I found it extremely boring. There were perhaps three out of twenty five titles that I enjoyed (“The Old Hatter� by Yi Munyol; “Seoul: Winter 1964� by Kim Sungok; and “House on the Prairie� by Kyung-sook Shin). My quest for fantastic Korean literature continues.
Rating: 2.5/5 Stars ___________________________________ [Subscribe to my free newsletter and receive curated links to poems, books, and literary knicknacks, as well as short essays and writing process notes directly into your inbox.]...more
From the book jacket: “In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. | |
From the book jacket: “In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.�
This seemed like the perfect recipe for a doomed romance story but I found myself falling asleep through this mercifully short read. I suspect the prose is far more beautiful in the the original Korean but in English it just didn’t work for me. This is the third Han Kang book I’ve read so far and possibly my least favorite of the three. If you’re going to read one of her books, start with The Vegetarian. ___________________________________ [Subscribe to my free newsletter and receive curated links to poems, books, and literary knicknacks, as well as short essays and writing process notes directly into your inbox.]...more
At Dusk by Hwang Sok-Yong was…ok. It’s a slim novel (under 200 pages) but it probably should have been longer—not be | |
At Dusk by Hwang Sok-Yong was…ok. It’s a slim novel (under 200 pages) but it probably should have been longer—not because I wanted the boredom to last but because the characters were so underdeveloped there needed be something extra to make me feel anything about them. It’s not worth rehashing the vague plot: just read the book description on ŷ. Rating: 2/5 stars. ___________________________________ [Subscribe to my free newsletter and receive curated links to poems, books, and literary knicknacks, as well as short essays and writing process notes directly into your inbox.]...more
This short novel opens with the eponymous Kim Jiyoung, a thirty-something-year-old woman with a young daughter, who | |
This short novel opens with the eponymous Kim Jiyoung, a thirty-something-year-old woman with a young daughter, who starts behaving very strangely one day—seeming to be possessed by a variety of women from her life. Her husband, alarmed by her deranged episodes grows concerned and contacts a psychiatrist. The rest of the novel is a spare, minimalist recounting of Jiyoung’s life story.
The novel starts off strong, with notes of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. The rest of the novel is, quite frankly, a victim narrative, wherein Jiyoung suffers relentless and systemic misogyny from her school days until adulthood, with actual statistics peppered throughout the text. (For example South Korea’s ranking on the glass ceiling index).
Beyond that first chapter, we never once return to Jiyoung’s strange behavior—the most interesting thing about the plot in my opinion. Instead we are treated to what I acknowledge is minimalist, lacerating prose with a harrowing plot that could make a misandrist out of anyone—but what we’re left with is a #MeToo style manifesto in the form of fiction, which makes an otherwise poignant novel feel annoyingly contrived. ___________________________________ [Subscribe to my free newsletter and receive curated links to poems, books, and literary knicknacks, as well as short essays and writing process notes directly into your inbox.]...more
Loading...
