The Private Life of Plants is about the ways in which desire can both worsen and mitigate our flaws. We meet amputee sons whose mothers cart them from brothel to brothel; we meet brothers who love their brother’s lovers, and whose lovers in turn are stolen away by the husbands of their sisters. Sexuality in … [Read More]
Booklist: Korean literature in translation (page 26)
Rina
Rina is a defector from a country that might be North Korea, traversing an “empty and futile” landscape. Along the way, she is forced to work at a chemical plant, murders a few people, becomes a prostitute, runs a lucrative bar, and finds a solace in a motley family of wanderers all as disenfranchised as … [Read More]
God Has No Grandchildren
The nine stories that make up this collection depict a wide variety of contemporary Koreans navigating a world focused on material wealth and social power, in which family ties have been disrupted and all relationships are dysfunctional. Unpredictable and enigmatic, these tales, though taking place in what would appear to be a shallow, materialistic environment, … [Read More]
A Good Family
This collection of eight stories cynical and sympathetic by turns represents the author’s attempt to document and understand the conflicts, resentments, hatreds, and anxieties of contemporary family life. The title story depicts a mother’s busy day playing numerous roles ashamed, fearless, or humble depending on which member of her family she’s tending to. In “The … [Read More]
Farewell Valley
Divided into four seasons, each represented by a different character, Farewell Valley is a novel in which death and suffering are a recurring motif and historical events are central to the story. The longest chapter is set during World War II, when the central character is sent to Manchuria as a comfort woman. [Read More]
The Girl who Wrote Loneliness
The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness is a stark and lyrical work that follows a teen-aged girl who has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory while struggling to achieve her dream of finishing school and becoming a writer. Shin sets the this complex and nuanced coming of age story against the backdrop of … [Read More]
Wild Apple
From the publisher’s website: “HeeDuk Ra’s poems evoke thoughts about time and language . . . Through her work, time does not glide nor stand on the edge. It crumbles.”—SeokJo Gang, literary critic Wild Apple takes the reader to cultural and intellectual experiences: Native American burial mounds, cremations at the Ganges River, the Paris morgue … [Read More]
The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher
The life of the salmon is a predictable one: swimming upstream to the place of its birth to spawn, and then to die. This is the story of a salmon whose silver scales mark him out as different – who dares to leap beyond his fate. It’s a story about growing up, and about aching … [Read More]
The Moving Fortress
Hwang Sunwon’s The Moving Fortress (1972) is a panorama of Korea and Koreans coming to terms with the confrontation of tradition with modernity. Contemporary events, such as the demolition of a squatter neighborhood, as well as flashbacks to the Korean War, help to set the social and historical context of the novel. [Read More]
Time to Eat Lobster: Contemporary Korean Stories on Memories of the Vietnam War
In his novellas Time to Eat Lobster and Forms of Being and the short story “Rice and Soup,” Bang Hyun-seok narrates the experiences of post-Cold War South Koreans and Vietnamese coming to terms with their own recent traumatic pasts at the same time as they form unusual bonds of love, friendship, and understanding. In this collection by a major … [Read More]
Two Stories From Korea: The Wounded & The Abject
From the publisher’s website: “The Wounded” is a compelling first-person narrative about two brothers—a doctor and a painter—marred by trauma. The older brother’s war trauma resurfaces when one of his patients unexpectedly dies during a routine operation He starts writing a novel set during the Korean War. The younger brother secretly reads the novel hoping … [Read More]
Princess Bari
In a drab North Korean city, a seventh daughter is born to a couple longing for a son. Abandoned hours after her birth, she is eventually rescued by her grandmother. The old woman names the child Bari, after a legend telling of a forsaken princess who undertakes a quest for an elixir that will bring … [Read More]
Nowhere to be Found
A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction. She can’t quite understand what motivates others to take life seriously enough to focus on anything—for her existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeting concepts. From … [Read More]
The Vegetarian
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism … [Read More]
Fired (K-Fiction 013)
To be considered interesting storytelling, a story’s structure should be built around a clear conflict between good and evil–a good-hearted and righteous underdog, hired as a temporary employee, who stands up to his Goliath of a boss, who is a shameless and brazen oppressor. But from the onset of the story, Chang Kangmyoung’s “Fired,” the … [Read More]
Modern Family
Forty-year-old In-mo, a movie director who’s been jobless for the past decade decides to move in with his widowed mother. His older brother, with five criminal convictions, has already moved back. Then younger sister Mi-yeon arrives with her bratty, rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter. Mom is delighted to have her entire dysfunctional family back again, but what … [Read More]