When it comes to fiction, 2023 was a year that defied my expectations. Those novels that I hoped or expected to enjoy turned out to be disappointments; those that I thought might be heavy going turned out to be enjoyable. It was a reminder to try better to abide by the maxim of approaching a book without the weight of expectation.
The year turned out to be a good one for big-name Korean novelists, with new translations of works by Han Kang, Shin Kyung-sook, Hwang Sok-yong, Gong Jiyoung, Pyun Hye-young and Cheon Myeong-gwan. Of course the last mentioned was runner-up in the International Booker Prize.
The buzz about Whale (tr Kim Chi-young) was welcome and, for me, unexpected. The novel had an interesting translation history: an earlier English version by another translator was completed for Dalkey Archive but never got published (though apparently you can find pre-publication proofs if you know where to look). Kim Chi-young’s version for Europa reads seamlessly and the novel is an entertaining, tragi-comic look at Korea’s post-war development, with larger-than-life characters, though somehow it didn’t trigger any deeper thoughts or emotions in me.
Another “big” (through brief) book this year was Han Kang’s Greek Lessons (tr Deborah Smith, Emily Yae Won). Foyles held a launch event at the South Bank Centre and even commissioned a special edition with hangul text sprayed on the fore edge. The title generally got good reviews and sold well, being a regular feature in Foyles Charing Cross Road top 10 best seller list in the early summer. Maybe if I’d set aside a couple of hours to read it in one sitting I’d have enjoyed it more, but as it was, I couldn’t get into it and gave up around a quarter of the way through.
I had reasonably high expectations of Shin Kyung-sook’s I Went to See my Father (tr Anton Hur), hoping that it would be a suitable companion-piece to Please Look After Mother. But while it does indeed ask us to consider our parents as human beings in their own right rather than as that permanent presence in our own lives, as I was presented with yet another trivial recollection of some incident in the narrator’s childhood which seemed only to serve to defer getting to the main subject of the book (the narrator’s father’s life) the thought occurred to me that the author must be paid by the page rather than by the novel. And once I’d had that thought I couldn’t un-think it. I got annoyed by irrelevant bits of padding in the story such as a two-page description of going to the locksmith to get a key cut and an almost chapter-length detour in which the narrator talks about her book tour to Scandinavia. The result was that by the time I got to the meat of the story (trauma suffered during the Korean War) I had lost any enthusiasm I might have had to start with. Besides which, I’d just read Cho Chongnae’s short story Land of Exile in the new Penguin anthology (see below), which covers much the same ground without all the flannel.
After that disappointment, I was hoping that the reliable Hwang Sok-yong would deliver the goods. But while Mater 2-10 (tr Sora Kim-Russell, Youngjae Josephine Bae) is a fitting tribute to the workers of the colonial period, particularly the railwaymen, and is a passionate advocate for workers’ rights, at times it reads like a historical text: the Japanese emperor’s surrender speech is reproduced verbatim, as are two of General MacArthur’s decrees; and at one point Hwang weighs in to the historical debate around whether the division of the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel was a spur-of-the-moment decision of military convenience or in fact had been agreed between the US and USSR in advance at the Potsdam conference. The novel is a lovely folksy read when it centres on the lives of the family at its centre, but as it moves out to tell the stories of the various communist resistance activists and then into historical exposition it becomes less engaging.
On the flip side, a novel inspired by a true story of systematic sexual abuse in a school for the deaf cannot truly be an enjoyable read, but it was probably the most rewarding read of the more serious novels I tackled this year. Gong Ji-young choses to site Togani (tr Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton) in the fictional town of Mujin; and just as in Kim Seung-ok’s short story the place is constantly shrouded in a menacing fog in which all sorts of society’s ills can lurk hidden. Gong is excellent at creating a dark, threatening atmosphere which compels you to continue reading. It’s a shame this title wasn’t picked up by a mainstream publisher, but we should be grateful to University of Hawai’i Press for bringing it to us.
The early part of the year I was trying to catch up on two of the 2022 translated novels that I didn’t manage to read last year: Cho Nam-joo’s Saha (tr Jamie Chang) and Seo Sujin’s Korean Teachers (tr Lizzie Buehler). Saha didn’t really work for me: a well-meaning dystopian fiction where too many of the plot lines are unresolved. But Korean Teachers was a delightful surprise – a highly readable (at times uncomfortably so) novel exploring the harsh realities of the education business, written with sympathy and insight.
Korean Teachers was the first translated novel published by Singapore’s Harriet Press, and having cleared my 2022 backlog I eagerly awaited their second novel: JM Lee’s Painter of the Wind (tr Hannah Pang, Stella Kim). It did not disappoint – a well-crafted historical whodunnit which will lead you to have a fresh understanding and appreciation of the genre paintings of Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok. It is definitely one of my books of the year.
One of the most intriguing texts for me this year was Hwang Yeo-jung’s The Specters of Algeria (tr Jung Yewon): an author otherwise unpublished in English, as far as I can see (at least in book form) – a novel of playwrights, theatre and Marxism. Tony Malone has a good discussion of it, to which the only thing I would add is that I spent most of the reading time wondering what the author intended to convey by giving the central character a name that is a near-perfect anagram of the real-life playwright Oh Tae-seok.
Head-scratching of a different nature was required with the latest K-thriller to translated by An Seon Jae: Im Seong-sun’s The Consultant – a fast-moving tale about a person who devises assassination scenarios. Quite apart from the fun plot twists and conversational tone of the storytelling there’s an interesting passage early on in the book which talks about the online literary scene in Korea (presumably in the late 90’s / early 00’s) from which we gather that murder mysteries are not at all popular compared to fantasy / martial arts stories – perhaps a reason why until recently we haven’t seen many K-thrillers come our way.
Thus far, I’ve focused on the novels in my reading list, but this was the year in which I rediscovered shorter fiction. I’d been looking forward to the Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories for a while, to see what new stories Bruce Fulton had secured for inclusion. As it happened, it was fewer than I was expecting from the advance publicity, with short stories by Kim Young-ha, Han Kang and Hwang Sok-yong mysteriously not making it into the final edit. Nevertheless, of the 25 stories selected, one third have, as far as I’m aware, never been published in English before, including stories by Hwang Jungeun, Pyun Hye-young and Shin Kyung-sook. My personal favourite of the new ones was a rambling, chatty story from Jung Young-moon. But it was also pleasant to revisit some of the oft-published older tales such as Buckwheat Season and Mother and her Guest; and somehow, when you’re faced with a story in a nice, newly-printed Penguin edition you’ll be happy to read it, whereas that same story in a 20-year old edition from an academic publisher doesn’t have the same allure. And so it was that this year was the first time I’d read Cho Chongnae’s Land of Exile, despite having had it on my shelves in another edition for years. Powerful stuff.
Reading the Shin Kyung-sook short story in the Penguin collection made me wonder whether I simply prefer some authors when they are writing shorter fiction. This feeling certainly applied to Cho Nam-joo’s collection of eight stories (including the eponymous Miss Kim Knows) translated by Jamie Chang, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The stories look at the life experiences of women of all ages. Some of them are angry, campaigning stories like Kim Ji-young Born 1982; others are more gentle. All of them are beautifully crafted and none of them outstay their welcome.
Finally, in this short story segment, comes the set of eight separately published short stories from Strangers Press curated by Anton Hur in a series entitled Iyagi. Among eight very different stories, each one appealing in its own right, my favourite was probably a tale from Park Wan-suh (For That Which Cannot Be Restored tr Soobin Kim) which addresses the difficulties encountered in digging into past political malfeasance; but a more complex story from Han Junghyun (Kyoko and Kyoji, tr Emily Yae Won) that references the traumas of Gwangju will repay a second reading, as will Serang Chung’s Take My Voice (tr Anton Hur), a fun story about humans with superhuman powers, which made me think of Kim Un-su’s Cabinet.
Back to full length novels, and two YA titles were justifiably getting a lot of attention this year. The gentle human stories of the comings and goings at the Hyunam-dong Bookshop (Hwang Bo-reum, tr Shanna Tan) is a delightful read, while the eccentric staff of the Dallergut Dream Department Store (Mi-ye Lee, tr Sandy Joosun Lee) brings seasonal enjoyment and pays homage to Korea’s folk custom of selling dreams.
I don’t think I would have known about Kang Hwagil’s Another Person (tr Clare Richards) if I hadn’t seen a talk by the translator advertised at the V+A. I’m grateful to have discovered it: a dark story of sexual assault in the workplace and on a university campus, somewhat reminiscent of Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon. On an equally dark theme, Pyun Hye-young’s The Owl Cries (tr Sora Kim-Russell) had me thinking of the classic TV series Twin Peaks. Djuna’s dystopian Counterweight (tr Anton Hur) addresses colonialism and out-of-control capitalism in a sci-fi thriller, one which I enjoyed in audiobook format. And saving the best till last, Dolki Min’s Walkling Practice (tr Victoria Caudle) is a deliciously wicked but thought-provoking title about a gender-fluid alien: the audiobook performed by Nicky Endres is one of the best things you’ll ever listen to.
That wraps up my fiction reading for the year, and I think I got around to pretty much everything published in 2023 apart from Lee Geum-yi’s Can’t I Go Instead? (next on my list) and Kang Young-sook’s At Night He Lifts Weights (only just published). It’s been a bumper year for new fiction. Thanks to the hard-working translators who bring these titles to us.
And now the non fiction…
I really only scratched the surface of the non-fiction published this year. One cannot talk about non-fiction titles released in 2023 without mentioning probably the biggest, most anticipated book of them all: BTS – Beyond the Story – which celebrates 10 years of the band’s existence. I cannot claim to have read all of it (I simply browsed it in a bookshop) but it’s certainly a significant publishing event. If this title is aimed at the specialist and devotee, at the other end of the scale is a title aimed at a complete newbie to Korea: Barbara Zitwer’s Korean Book of Happiness. Zitwer, who has done so much to bring translated Korean literature to an English-speaking audience, has produced a delightful entry-level book which presents her personal experiences in getting to know Korea. You won’t be able to repeat everything she has experienced, much of which is as a result of the sort of serendipity which can happen only if you are very lucky, but you can follow up some of her recommendations, such as a trip to Wonju’s Museum San. I did, and I’m eternally grateful for the tip.
I briefly skip over Fiona Bae’s Make, Break, Remix – The Rise of K-Style, a title published in 2022, which I found baffling and intimidating in equal measure, and come to my most enjoyable reads in the non-fiction space this year: Hawon Jung’s Flowers of Fire, which dissects Korea’s #MeToo movement and other gender issues in a way which is more informative and even entertaining than any novel. That’s probably not the right word, but it’s a real pager-turner. And finally, a great book for browsing, for disagreeing with, and for rekindling your passion for Korean cinema: Jake Cunningham and Michael Leader’s Film Korea. Put it on the coffee table, in the smallest room in the house, in the guest bedroom or on your own bedside table: anywhere that someone’s going to pick it up, read a 5-10 minute chapter and be inspired to go off and track down a movie to watch.
You can find a listing of all Korea-related books we’re aware of that were published in 2023 here. The list includes translated literature, non-fiction, fiction in English and poetry.
Summary: LKL’s picks of 2023
| Fiction |
|
| Non-fiction | |
| Audiobook |
|
Links:
Absolutely loved this roundup, thank you so much for writing it.
Glad you found it useful!
Another great run-through of the year in K-Lit, and supplemented by your comments on the traditional Christmas card, which I received just after the big day! Many thanks – always a pleasure to find this in my letter box, and I’m rather ashamed that I keep forgetting to reciprocate 🙁
No worries Tony. Have a great New Year!
A link to a Twitter thread with links to Paul Fulcher’s reviews of 2023 books on Goodreads:
https://twitter.com/fulcherpaul/status/1741583894497870248