Author: Hwang Sok-yong
Translated by: Jay Oh
Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2009
Original title: 오래된 정원, 2000
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Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopian dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yoon Hee once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, Hyum Woo relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth—a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history.
He weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the Wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-yong grapples with the immortal questions—the endurance of love, the price of a commitment to causes—while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life for the dream of a better tomorrow.
LKL says:
Thus the novel criss-crosses pleasingly between fiction and real life – the fall of the Berlin Wall and of course Gwangju. The passion and ideology is well presented, dressed up in the framework of a love story.
LKL rating: 
. Read our review of this book here.
Read a review by Tony Malone here. Entry on Goodreads.com here.
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