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I Went to See My Father

Author:
Translated by:
Publisher: , 2023
Original title: 아버지에게 갔었어, 2021
Link to online store *

An instant bestseller in Korea and the follow up to the international bestseller, Please Look After Mom; centering on a woman’s efforts to reconnect with her aging father, uncovering long-held family secrets.

Two years after losing her daughter in a tragic accident, Hon finally returns to her home in the countryside to take care of her father. At first, her father only appears withdrawn and fragile, an aging man, awkward but kind around his own daughter. Then, after stumbling upon a chest of letters, Hon discovers the truth of her father’s past and reconstructs her own family history.

Consumed with her own grief, Hon had been blind to her father’s vulnerability and her family’s fragility. Unraveling secret after secret and thanks to conversations with loving family and friends, Hon grows closer to her father, who proves to be more complex than she ever gave him credit for. After living through one of the most tumultuous times in Korean history, her father’s life was once vibrant and ambitious, but spiraled during the postwar years. Now, after years of emotional isolation, Hon learns the whole truth, from her father’s affair and involvement in a cult, to the dynamic lives of her own siblings, to her family’s financial hardships.

What Hon uncovers about her father builds towards her understanding of the great scope of his sacrifice and heroism, and of her country as a whole. More than just the portrait of a single man, I Went to See My Father opens a window onto humankind, family, loss, and war. With this long-awaited follow-up to Please Look After Mom—flawlessly rendered by award-winning translator Anton Hur—Kyung-Sook Shin has crafted an ambitious, global, epic, and lasting novel.

Source: publisher’s website

LKL says:

I try hard to appreciate Shin Kyung-sook, and as this novel is billed as a quasi follow-up to PLAM I tried extra-hard with this one. But while the novel 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, which covers much the same ground without all the flannel. Not for the first time, I found myself wishing that Shin had an editor unafraid to wield the red pen.

LKL rating: score-2score-2score-1score-0score-0

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