It was a busy year outside of my Korean interests, with the result that I didn’t read as much as I would like. And of the titles that I did read, I haven’t had a chance yet formally to write up my thoughts – though there are several half-written reviews which may eventually see the light of day. But I’m afraid that after a stellar year for translated literature in 2021, there has been less to write home about in 2022.
Bae Myung-hoon’s Launch Something! (tr Stella Kim, Honford Star 2022), though enjoyable, somehow didn’t scale the inventive heights of Tower (though the cover art was just as good); The Age of Doubt (tr Anton Hur, Dasom Yang, Emily Yae Won, Mattho Mandersloot, Paige Aniyah Morris, Slin Jung, Sophie Bowman, You Jeong Kim, pub Honford Star 2022) didn’t manage to make me think more fondly of Pak Kyungni, though one of the seven stories (The Era of Fantasy – an extended reminiscence about colonial era schooldays) stood out as something new, to me at least; Violets (tr Anton Hur, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022) felt less overlong than other of Shin Kyung-sook’s novels, but still could have used a trim. My appreciation of the novel was enhanced by the inclusion of the author’s own afterword, written 20 years after the novel was originally published; and similarly with The Age of Doubt a brief commentary published at the end of the collection was interesting and informative.
Concerning my Daughter (tr Jamie Chang, Picador, 2022), a socially-aware novel which carries an endorsement from Cho Nam-joo, author of Kim Ji-young Born 1982, confronts some grim realities about the impact of cost pressures on our daily lives but is nevertheless a more rewarding read than Kim Ji-young. More enjoyment was to be found in the currently healthy genre of translated thrillers – Gu Byeong-mo’s The Old Woman with the Knife (tr Kim Chi-young, Hanover Square Press, 2022) was great fun, and JM Lee’s Broken Summer (tr An Seon Jae, Amazon Crossing, 2022) was similarly engaging. Lee Geum-yi’s The Picture Bride (tr An Seon Jae, Forge 2022) was a well-researched historical novel that portrayed well the struggles of an immigrant population in Hawai’i.
That, I think, is a complete list of fiction published in translation in 2022 other than the first novel to be published by Singapore’s Harriet Press: Seo Su-jin’s Korean Teachers (tr Lizzie Buehler). That volume is on its way to me as I write this.1
After the bumper year that was 2021, that’s a disappointingly short list, but on the plus side that gave me an opportunity to catch up on some of the backlog from previous years. First came Kim Won-il’s The Scorpion (tr Kang Sunok, Melissa Thomson) – a little bit heavy handed in its historical exposition but nevertheless interesting for its depiction of three generations of a family struggling with the tides of history. After that rather lengthy novel I needed some short stories as light relief. Gong Ji-young’s My Sister Bongsoon (tr Park Jung-eun) was interesting for its focus on the fate of a poor maid as Korea industrialises; The Place where the Harmonium Was (tr Agnita Tennant) confirmed my ambivalent attitude to Shin Kyung-sook while The Summer (tr Jamie Chang) confirmed my enthusiasm for Choi Eun-young.
I took a brief detour into Korea-related fiction in other languages: June Hur’s early 19th century historical detective story Silence of Bones (2020) is well-researched and entertaining, while Elisa Shua Dusapin‘s slightly melancholy Winter in Sokcho (2020) makes me want to explore her follow-up, Pachinko Parlour.
In non-fiction, my reading this year has been mainly of memoirs. Possibly the most anticipated memoir was Baek Sehee’s bestseller I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (tr Anton Hur, Bloomsbury). I gave up on it after about page 30, having failed to engage with it. I’m comforted that Tony Malone shared my lack of enthusiasm. Another 2022 memoir that was hard going was Shin Young-bok’s Reflections from Prison (tr Cho Byeong-eun, Jin Young-jong, Kim Hain, pub Meredith Victory) which like Kim Ji-young Born 1982 comes with an endorsement from Moon Jae-in. I got to the end, but failed to see why it’s a bestseller. No Korean I spoke to in London could explain its importance (though some said that they had studied it at school) – but I did at least learn one thing in my enquiries: it is Shin Young-bok’s calligraphy that adorns bottles of Lotte Chilseung’s leading soju brand, Chum Churum.
Other memoirs I tackled this year were all highly recommendable: Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart (2021), E.J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others (2020), both of which grapple with the experience of second generation Korean Americans, and The Hard Road Out (2022) by Jihyun Park and Seh-Lynn Chai – a North Korean escapee testimony with a warm heart.
- Edit: Another 2022 translated novel that I missed was Cho Nam-joo’s dystopian Saha, published in August (tr Jamie Chang). This will appear in my roundup for 2023. [↩]