With the year fast drawing to a close, there's just enough time to fit in one virtual trip to Korea before the clock strikes twelve. Today we're looking at the second book from the Asia Publishers K-Fiction series, and where Dinner with Buffett examined capitalism in the big city, this one is a little more exotic in its themes...
*****
Park Hyoung-su's Arpan (translated by Sora Kim-Russell, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is a story about a story, an examination of what it means to be a writer and how closely what we write is linked to all that has come before. The narrator is a Korean writer helping to organise a third-world writers festival in Seoul, an undertaking which is not quite as altruistic as it may appear.
In his youth, the writer spent time with the Waka people on the Thai-Burmese border, and during his time abroad, he encountered Arpan, the only writer of a tribe with an oral culture. Helping out with the festival, then, is merely a means for getting the affable storyteller to visit Seoul, his first trip away from his mountain home. In reality, though, while the narrator is happy to see Arpan again, the reason for the invitation has little to do with the festival - our friend has a secret, and the time has come for it to be told...
Arpan is another excellent story from the K-Fiction range, a piece which has as one of its focuses the preservation of minority cultures and languages. Park examines what it means to preserve a culture, asking whether the idea is even possible. Whereas no change means it is doomed to extinction, too much outside influence will inevitably lead to a dilution of traditions and perhaps total assimilation. It's a fine line to tread, and keeping the balance is often impossible.
The reader is shown an example of a minority culture in the figure of Arpan, a member of the Waka (a tall people from the mountains). In the Waka culture, height has a heightened(!) significance, with size or volume less important than how high items can be stacked. You can imagine the impression the lofty skyscrapers of Seoul make on a man who lives in a small settlement of rude huts.
At the festival itself, the man from the mountains is even more out of place. There's a clash of cultures, with the audience laughing silently at Arpan, looking down on a man much bigger (in many ways) than they are. While the narrator despises the people in the room, he has his own confused relationship with the visitor:
"I cared more about Arpan than anyone else in the world. Still, I couldn't deny the fact that lurking on the other side of that love was an indefinable hatred. Maybe it was similar to the hatred that later generations feel towards an unconquerable original."
p.21 (Asia Publishers, 2014)
The truth is that the writer is no different to the audience - as we are to discover.
The second main theme concerns the idea of inspiration, being part of a literary tradition, and the temptation of crossing the border into plagiarism. When the writer finally sits Arpan down to reveal the secret he's been keeping, he gives an example of a song evolving across countries and centuries:
"The human arts have never once been pure. Every act of creation we undertake is footnoted and amended with respect to an existing point of view. It builds up layer by layer." (p.65)
It's an interesting idea, and possibly true - but (to lean on literary tradition myself) methinks the writer doth protest too much...
As the writer sits down opposite his imposing visitor, the reader is confronted with a question: which is more important, the writer or the story? The way Arpan ends seems to answer the question decisively. The truth, though, is that no matter how ingenious his justifications are, the writer will always wonder whether he's done the right thing...
*****
Arpan is an excellent, thought-provoking story, enhanced (as the Asia Publishers books always are) by the added extras. The inclusions this time are especially good as we are treated to the writer's own views on the story, in which he explains what he was trying to achieve. It also features an excellent translation by Sora Kim-Russell (translator of, amongst other works, Shin Kyung-sook's I'll Be Right There). In fact, both the books in this series that I've read so far have been far better in this regard than those in the Bilingual series - a welcome sign that the standard of translation is getting better and better.
If you're new to K-Lit, and hesitant to dive into the longer (and more culturally-loaded) seminal works, the K-Fiction series looks like a nice place to start - particularly if you're keen on the idea of having a bilingual version. For those of you outside Korea (i.e. almost everyone...), the whole set is available on Amazon, and buying all five would probably be the cheapest way to get hold of them. I've got one more to look at - hopefully I'll be writing more about this series very soon :)
Not many people will be posting Christmas Day reviews, but mine is a blog that never sleeps (besides, what better present can I give you all than another review?). With that in mind, Merry Christmas, and happy reading ;)
*****
One of the best discoveries I've made during my look at Korean literature is O Chong-hui (Oh Jung-hee), a writer whose stories of ordinary people stand out among the many works I've read this year. She's known as a master of the short form, so I was interested to see how a longer piece would read - hence the book covered in today's post. It's a work which begins simply enough, but as O is not an author who creates happy shiny people, we know that there'll be some darker tones just around the corner...
*****
The Bird (translated by Jenny Wang Medina) is set in Korea in the 1990s. Young U-mi and her little brother U-il have been abandoned by their mother, with the father then forced to venture far afield for work, promising to return one day. After some years spent with relatives:
"Father had arrived without warning to take us away. I could hear a voice solemnly and tragically recounting my fate just like in a fairy tale, saying how it came to be so that one day they had to leave the house. It was as if I had always known that there would come a day when I would have to follow that call to leave unquestioningly."
p.21 (Telegram Books, 2007)
For the two children, life is about to change. As well as being reunited with their father, they are about to encounter another surprise in the form of a new mother...
With a clean new room, even if it is devoid of luxuries, and friendly new neighbours, it looks as if life has turned a corner. However, the reality is that the high hopes are unlikely to last. Neither the father nor his new wife are the type to stick around when times get tough, and the events to come will have their effect on the two children. They're used to being by themselves, but can they really survive all alone?
The Bird is a little different from the majority of the stories I've read by the author, mainly in its focus on the children (especially U-mi). The story starts innocently enough, a story of life in the nineties for poor working-class kids. The reader soon warms to the clever U-mi, who is doing her best to look after herself and her brother in the absence of parent.
She can expect little help from her father. He's a dreamer, ambitious and violent by turns, but he's also a man caught by the times. In order to survive, he needs to keep moving to where the work is (which, to be honest, probably suits him...). After a few drinks, his violent streak appears, and the events the children witness are bound to leave their mark. A question which repeatedly haunts the reader is that of the mother's whereabouts, and while U-mi accepts her father's story, the reader is a little more suspicious...
In any case, U-mi has no time to speculate as she needs to look after her younger brother. U-il is a dreamer, an innocent, slightly backward boy, who is obsessed by a cartoon character, to the extent of believing he too can fly. Again, what seems like an innocent, childish belief will later be shown to have a more sinister origin.
For the first half of The Bird, I felt that it was a book more aimed at teenagers, not bad but perhaps lacking in range and emotion, with U-mi's limited voice restricting the story. Of course, I should have known better - O is a writer known for her depth, and slowly, gradually, the optimistic tone turns sour. To start with, it's little things, such as the children's destructive tendencies (for example, in cutting faces from photos) or the treatment of poor Mr. Bear, the take-home toy from U-mi's class at school.
The last third of the book then casts away all pretence at the innocence of youth as disturbing events begin to pile up in a masterful development of a descent into darkness. There's violence, sexual awakening and painstaking description of the filth of the underclass (there's one scene in particular which might be rather distressing for westerners...). By the end of the book, I'd have to say things have turned almost Ogawaesque - and I mean that in a good way ;)
The writing is excellent, and Wang Medina has done good work in capturing U-mi's young voice. The book begins with fairly simple writing that gradually darkens as the story progresses, more from the content than the style. A nice touch is the childlike use of the word 'Mummy', a choice I found a little questionable at the start - by the end, the word seems almost sinister and mocking...
The title isn't merely drawn from U-il's dreams of flying as there is an actual bird involved. Belonging to the children's neighbour, Mr. Yi, the tiny creature is kept safe in a cage, high above the floor:
"If I put it on the floor, she'd get eaten by a rat faster than I could move a muscle. And birds are meant to live in the heavens like angels or fairies aren't they? What's so great about a dirty, muddy world of land that's swarming with bad people who want to catch you for their dinner?" (p.36)
The Bird is an apt symbol of the theme of the novel, a creature representing hope and freedom, but one who is unlikely to ever obtain it. Just like the bird, U-mi is likely to have a bleak future - the story, however is a very good one. Chalk up another success for O Chong-hui :)
The next stop on my cruise through the history of Korean literature is the latest book from my recent visit to the local university library. It's a book which comes highly recommended (e.g. by Charles over at Korean Literature in Translation), and having read it, I can see why. A great collection of stories, this is definitely a book more people should be aware of :)
*****
Wayfarer - New Fiction by Korean Women is a 1997 anthology from Women in Translation Press, edited and translated by (of course) Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. It introduces eight female writers from South Korea, each represented by one story. Originally released between 1974 and 1994, the stories are a representation of the influence female writers are having on Modern Korean Literature.
The title comes from a story from O Chong-hui (and an excellent one it is too) about a woman trying to rejoin society after a traumatic incident. However, I won't say too much about it here as it was one of the stories I featured in my post on the Modern Korean Fiction anthology earlier this year, and one that piqued my interest in female writers from the country.
Even if we overlook O's story, though, there are several other great pieces, with a few common themes. One of those is the struggle women have with gender roles, with So Yong-un's excellent 'Dear Distant Love' being a prime example. It features a woman obsessed with a no-good lover, a man who walks all over her (and took her daughter away soon after the birth). Yet somehow she still feels a need to treat him as a (Korean) husband should be treated:
"Before Han-su could knock on the door, Mun-ja recognized the sound of his steps and went out to welcome him. She helped him off with his coat, she removed his socks, she brought a basin of hot water and washed his feet, and each of these objects turned the color of gold."
'Dear Distant Love', p.125 (Women in Translation Press, 1997)
It's a twisted tale, and poor Mun-ja is a martyr to her no-good lover, a woman who believes that no sacrifice is too great for the man she has decided to devote her life to...
A shorter story is Kim Chi-won's 'Almaden', which describes the life of a Korean woman at a bottle shop in New York. The story alternates between the dull description of her work routine and her fantasies of the rugged man who comes in every day for a bottle of cheap wine. Almaden (her name for the man, but actually the brand of wine he drinks) comes to be a symbol of escape from everyday life, representative of the life she'd like to lead if only she dared.
A more subtle approach is provided by a writer I've encountered a couple of times before, namely Ch'oe Yun. In 'The Last of Hanak'o', a man on a business trip to Italy attempts to pluck up the courage to meet up with a female friend from his younger years. As the story evolves, events of the past are revealed, slowly emerging from the mist:
"It is forbidden to venture near the canal railing on stormy days. Take precautions in the fog, particularly the winter fog... Then enter the labyrinth. And bear in mind, the more frightened you are, the more lost you will be."
'The Last of Hanak'o', p.11
These words start the story, taken from a sign near the Grand Canal, but they could just as easily refer to the man's struggles to come to grips with the past. This one is a wonderful tale of men struggling to deal with women for who they are, a story with a nice (if fairly obvious) twist in the tail.
Not all the stories are as good, though. Two later pieces which look at the role of housewives are the weakest of the eight (perhaps I'm not the right reader for this kind of story). Kong Son-ok's 'The Flowering of Our Lives' looks at a woman struggling to come to terms with her relationships with her mother and daughter, preferring drinking to looking after her daughter. Meanwhile, Park Wan-suh's 'Identical Apartments' provides another typical tale of a housewife dying of boredom, never satisfied, whether living with the in-laws or moving into a new apartment. Once again, as I've discovered several times before, Park's privileged whinging proves not to be to my taste...
However, the remaining stories are much better, and the final two summarised here have a more political edge. Kong Chi-yong's 'Human Decency' portrays a magazine journalist working on two different stories: one is on a former artist, a beauty who has written a book on meditation; the other deals with a recently released political prisoner. This second assignment brings back memories of the journalist's own time as a protester in the 1980s:
"How single-minded we children of the 1980s were to believe that right would triumph whatever the circumstances; how firmly we grew up believing that justice would win out in the end."
'Human Decency', p.75
The question here is which story she should prioritise in a country that would prefer to forget the past...
There are more politics on show in Kim Min-suk's 'Scarlet Fingernails'. In this one, a woman gets to meet her father for the first time after he has spent decades in prison for being a suspected spy from the North. It's an excellent story looking at the problem of guilt by association, an issue which was only recently resolved. Many of the family members resent the prisoner, not because of the years he's spent away from them, but for the shadow he has nevertheless cast over their dreams and ambitions.
Even if not all of the stories were to my taste, Wayfarer is a great collection, one I'd definitely recommend. Some similarities in style are evident across the stories, one being the gradual reveal, switching between the present-day setting and pivotal moments of the past to colour in the whole picture (perhaps the influence of O Chong-hui on later writers). There's also sterling work, as always, by the Fultons, including an introduction giving a background of female writing throughout Korean history. While I would have enjoyed more stories (eight is a fairly small selection), the overall quality is unquestionable - Wayfarer is well worth a read and a great first step into the area of female-written Korean fiction :)
This year has seen a fair bit of Korean literature reviewed on Tony's Reading List, and the instigator for this was definitely the Library of Korean Literature project brought about by Dalkey Archive Press and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. The number of K-Lit reviews has already passed twenty-five for the year (fairly impressive when you think that prior to 2014 I'd only read and reviewed one...), but today is a landmark day anyway. You see, this post is my tenth review from the Dalkey series - and, luckily enough, it turns out to be on my favourite book from the series so far :)
*****
Haïlji's The Republic of Užupis (translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, review copy courtesy of the publisher and Australian distributor Footprint Books) is a wonderful addition to my burgeoning K-Lit library, a novel much more experimental and western-influenced than most of what I've read before. The novel begins with an Asian man arriving in Lithuania, attempting to get past the rather tall guards at immigration. When asked if he plans to stay long in the country, his reply is rather unusual - he intends to depart within a day or so, as soon as he has worked out how to get to his intended destination.
So, where is he off to? Russia? Poland? Belarus? No... Hal, our inscrutable Oriental, is actually a native of a land which has just reclaimed its independence after decades under foreign control. His goal is the Republic of Užupis, the land of his birth, the home of the language he understands but can no longer speak. If only he could find someone who knows where his country is actually located...
The Republic of Užupis is a superb book, one-hundred-and-fifty pages of inventiveness, the story of a man trying to find a country which may not exist. It's full of a deliberately confusing series of events including encounters with strangers, beautiful women, tall men and lots of snow, geese and grandfather clocks (really). Trust me, it all makes some kind of sense (to the author, at least).
In Vilnius, there is a real Užupis (a semi-official micro-state), a place which inspires jokes from the locals, and the book acknowledges the real-life situation:
"The people of this city call this particular area Užupis - it means 'the other side of the river'. It is the most run-down area in Vilnius. As a joke, the struggling artists who live here began calling it the Republic of Užupis. They even wrote a Declaration of Independence and established April Fool's Day as their Independence Day."
pp.19/20 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014)
This mock republic, however, is not the place Hal is looking for:
"That's interesting - a bogus Republic of Užupis. But where I'm going is not a joke, it's the actual Republic of Užupis." With that, Hal pulled the postcard from his pocket and displayed it. "This was mailed from the actual Republic of Užupis." (p.20)
Exiled for most of his life in the land of Han (a thinly-concealed Korea), where his father was an ambassador, all Hal has to guide him on his way is a suitcase with photos showing people and flags. Oh, and memories of the haunting anthem...
On the search for his elusive homeland, he heads onto the streets of Vilnius and is thrown straight into a whirlwind of parties and chance encounters. Just who are these 6' 6'' men he encounters (and seriously, what's with the obsession with the grandfather clocks...)? Eventually, he catches up with a woman he spotted during his first hours in Lithuania, the beautiful Jurgita, and hears about her involvement in the past with an Užupis man of Asian appearance. With time running out, will this chance connection show him the way home?
The Republic of Užupis
is a short book, but it's one which throws up a million questions. Time loops around (this isn't a book to follow the laws of time and space), and over the course of his constant encounters with his new friends, the reader begins to suspect that they might actually be old ones. Everywhere Hal goes, he sees places he vaguely remembers, photos that look oddly familiar:
"In another photograph, taken in a study, people sat around a huge table engaged in conversation. The walls were lined with bookshelves packed with ancient tomes in ornate bindings. The walls to the right, as you looked at the photo, bore windows, the source of light for the scene. Prominent in the photo was the marble sculpture set between the windows, a bust of a man whose agonized face was cupped in his hands. The study was virtually identical to the room in which Hal now sat with Vladimir. But the three men failed to notice this." (p.38)
It's almost as if he keeps walking into another time, his memory failing to remind him that he's seen these things before...
The book is a superb look at the importance of home and the impossibility of reaching that different country, the past, and while Haïlji is a writer with his own style, a western reader would be hard pressed to read this novel without being reminded of Kafka. There's the snowy beginning, the aimless wandering through menacing streets, the large ramshackle houses, the cafés, the meandering corridors in government offices - all recounted in the writer's own calm, casual voice. The reader is never quite sure exactly what's happening - they're sure to enjoy it, nonetheless.
One of the keys to the novel is language. The Republic of Užupis is set in Lithuania, but as Hal doesn't know the language, much of the dialogue takes place in English (a story of our times...). However, as the book progresses, there are more occasions when Hal suddenly hears Užupis being spoken. He knows what's being said, but, having lost the ability to communicate in the language, he finds himself in the frustrating position of being unable to make himself understood. This miscommunication only adds to the difficulty of finally getting home...
All of the above makes for a clever, mind-bending book which will appeal to anyone who enjoys novels which require more than simple page-turning. It's superbly translated by the Fultons (which goes without saying), catching the slightly off-kilter tone and the unnatural conversations which often occur between people communicating in a third language. The Republic of Užupis is a book I want to reread when I find a few spare hours, and it's one I hope will get some decent recognition. Just as is the case with No One Writes Back and Pavane for a Dead Princess, this is a book which deserves to rise above the status of merely one work in the Library collection. Here's hoping it finds the audience it deserves :)
*****
Footprint Books, as always, assure me that this book is available in Australia, either at bookshops or through their website :)
Regular readers may have heard of Asia Publishers through my reviews of a couple of their Modern Korean Literature Bilingual Edition books (I Live in Bongcheon-dong, The Road to Sampo), but they recently added a new series to their collection. Where the first series focused on some of the older writers on the Korean scene, the recently announced K-Fiction Series looks at stories by the next generation - and the first one I looked at was by a writer whose name is rather familiar :)
*****
Park Min-gyu's Dinner with Buffett (translated by Jeon Sung-hee, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is a story featuring American finance guru Warren Buffett, an endearingly bizarre tale which looks at a day in the life of the wizard of the stock market, one he's unlikely to forget in a hurry. After a meeting with the American President in which they discuss peculiar developments, he rushes back to New York for dinner with the winner of a charity auction.
You'd expect a man who's shelled out big bucks to eat with Buffett to be eager to get some insights into his financial dealings. In fact, the winner, a young Korean man, just seems happy to share dinner with the great man, with no ulterior motive. Something's not quite right here...
My last look at Park's work was the excellent Pavane for a Dead Princess, and this is another wonderful piece. The story takes a look at the contemporary world and wonders if there's an alternative to the soulless neoliberal state we find ourselves in. The reason Buffett has been summoned to Washington is that the President has become aware of a threat (one the reader is not entirely privy to) - all we know is that 'they' are coming, and that their values are very different to those the two men share.
It seems a rather unusual threat, but for people like Buffett this is scarier than any alien invasion, the idea of money having little value. On the plane back, he reminisces about his beginnings, a time which may be about to fade into history:
"He thought that people were like sailors on a ship, sailing across time itself, and that he had been living in the great age of investment. That age was not yet over. But he also wondered if he was perhaps still carrying out the business of the past century, the sweet flavor of which had already vanished. He was still chewing his gum."
pp.19/21 (Asia Publishers, 2014)
Little does he know that his first encounter with 'them' is just around the corner...
Ahn, the winning bidder for the meal, is not the kind of person Buffett was expecting, and the dinner doesn't exactly run as he would have expected either. The winning bid is a six-figure sum, but when we find out where it came from, the great financier isn't the only one to get a surprise. With Ahn seemingly uninterested in pumping Buffett for financial knowledge, it all seems a waste... Why did he come to the dinner? Is he happy with the choices he's made?
"I'm fine thanks,"
And then,
"And you?" (p.67)
It's a question that Buffett might need some time to ponder.
Dinner with Buffett is a rather topical story (the traffic jam Buffett runs into on the way to dinner is caused by Occupy protests); in a post-GFC climate, it's a story looking at a possible post-capitalist ideology. The idea is that if enough people turn their backs on chasing the dollar, great things could happen - the way to shake bankers from their complacency is to simply ignore them... It's an intriguing idea, although I'm not sure quite how feasible it is. What's certain is that this is a wonderful story, with Jeong Sung-hee's translation bringing the deceptively casual tone across nicely. Definitely a piece that makes you wonder if it really is that easy to change the world...
*****
The new K-Fiction series has kicked off with five stories by young writers. It has the same format as the Modern Korean Fiction series, with the text in both Korean and English, plus an analysis at the end of the book (the only difference is that the covers are more colourful!). If you're interested in the rest of the series, all five have already been reviewed over at Korean Literature in Translation. I have another two to read and review, so I'm sure you'll be seeing more about them over here at some point too.
But wait - there's more... In Seoul, on the 13th of December, there's an opportunity to meet all five authors at a special event. You can check out this link for all the details - including the fact that it's free! This is an excellent chance to get up close and personal with some of the rising stars of K-Lit, so congratulations to Asia Publishers, Barry Welsh and Charles Montgomery for getting the show on the road.
When you add this kind of event to the great things the Literature Translation Institute of Korea has been doing recently, you can see that this is an exciting time for Korean literature in translation. If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, why not get on board? I'm sure 2015 is going to be just as big as this year has been, with lots of exciting events in store - stay tuned for details ;)
We're back with another slight detour from German Literature Month to Korea, and this time we're looking at a more classic book. Today's post concerns an early modern K-Lit novel from one of the big names of the time. It's a book that has lofty ambitions to cover a wide range of societal issues - even if it doesn't always hit the target...
*****
Yi Kwang-su's 'Mujong: The Heartless', translated by Ann Sung-Hi Lee) dates from 1917 (which is probably as far back as I've gone in my Korean reading so far). The main character of the piece is Yi Hyong-sik, a young teacher in Seoul, whose days are spent pouring his energies into teaching his students and avoiding the temptations of the outside world. He's a shy, chaste innocent young man, so when he is one day visited by a young woman, garbed as a kisaeng (Korean Geisha), he's rather surprised - especially when she claims she knows him.
The young woman turns out to be Pak Yong-ch'ae, the daughter of Hyong-sik's dead mentor, and having kept her innocence intact despite her years entertaining drunken men, she has come to find the man her father recommended as her husband before his death. So, is there to be a happy ending for Hyong-sik and Yong-ch'ae? It's rather unlikely. This is no fairy tale, and these two young naive people have other destinies...
Let's be clear about something from the start; Mujong is not a book for the average reader to pick up and flick through. It's a story of an alien place and time, written in a rather dry style for the most part, which may well put many readers off. I've encountered Yi's work twice this year already (The Soil, Gasil), and he doesn't have the most endearing of styles - calling him didactic is probably being generous ;)
However, if you can get past this, Mujong is an entertaining story. While the focus is mainly on Hyong-sik and Yong-ch'ae, there is a love triangle of sorts as the young teacher falls for the attractions of his private English student, Kim Son-hyong. She is a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old (in Korean years...) and makes for a striking contrast to Yong-ch'ae and her kisaeng past. Hyong-sik, thus far pure of body, is tempted both by his young student (who is later offered to him in marriage) and the beautiful Yong-ch'ae, a woman he feels bound to marry from gratitude to his deceased mentor.
This is very much a book of awakenings, with all of the major characters beginning to think about themselves, and the society they live in, for the first time. One major awakening is obviously their growing awareness of their sexuality: Yong-ch'ae has been saving herself for Hyong-sik, a deluded fantasy which might yet prove to be dangerous; Hyong-sik is just starting to realise that there's more to life than books. Perhaps the most innocent of the three, though, is Son-hyong, a young girl who has led a very sheltered life thus far:
"She was the same as when she had been born - the same as when she had been organically and biologically produced. She was like a machine that had been kept in a storage shed and never actually been used. She was not yet a person."
p.136 (Cornell East Asia Series, 2005)
Now, with marriage imminent, she's forced to confront the realities of life, including the prospect of physical relations with a man she doesn't really know...
Mujong focuses on social awakenings too, with the book being as much a critique of Korea and its people as the story of a love triangle. In fact, Yi (through Hyong-sik), frequently uses his opportunity to criticise neo-Confucian norms, cultural ideas which are holding Korea back:
"Hyong-sik believed that while all human beings were the same by nature, an individual or society could be improved and uplifted with the effort of that society or individual. The women, however, believed that humans had no responsibility for what happened in life. Human beings just lived life as it happened, with no improvement or reform through human will. This is how Koreans view life!" (p.209)
One concrete aspect of this fatalism is the failing school system, where cronyism and ignorance need removing so that the country can modernise after the western model. It's high time that unnecessary customs and beliefs are swept away.
The major area Yi sets his sights on is young arranged marriages, a topic the writer had personal experience of. Mujong features several examples of unhappy marriages which lead to dismal lives, with concubines, kisaeng and suicide more prevalent than loving couples. Modern readers will be dismayed by the way in which several disturbing scenes (including female oppression and rape) are glossed over matter of factly, but in many ways this is a book which attempts to fight the feminist cause. While offensive in parts by 21st-Century standards, Mujong does raise the issue of the way women are treated, in particular insisting on treating the scorned kisaeng like any other woman.
Mujong is a book of its time in other ways too. It's divided into 126 short sections, reflecting its origins as a serialised newspaper novel, very much as early modern Japanese novels appeared (a fact which makes it a little repetitive at times, as serialised works often are). In fact, there are other similarities to early J-Lit. The way Yi uses internal monologues, with the characters going back and forth in their agonised deliberations, is reminiscent of Natsume Soseki's Light and Dark. While nowhere near as insightful as the Japanese writer's work, Yi's novel can show some surprisingly nuanced psychology at times.
This edition of the novel is actually an academic one, a translation bundled with an extended introduction with information about both the author and the book. While I appreciate Ann Sung-Hi Lee's efforts, I have to say that it wasn't amazingly illuminating, erring on the side of academic appropriacy over interesting reading. And, in truth, that pretty much sums up the book as a whole. As mentioned above, it's certainly not for everyone, but serious K-Lit aficionados looking to broaden their knowledge of the period should definitely check it out :)
Today I'm taking a short break from German Literature Month to return to my major project for the year, my self-education in the world of Korean literature, and this review looks at more work from an excellent writer I discovered this year. It's a wonderful collection of stories, definitely a book I'd recommend - and it's rather pretty too :)
*****
O Chong-hui's River of Fire and Other Stories (translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, review copy courtesy of Columbia University Press and Australian distributor Footprint Books) is a nice selection of stories from a writer described in the afterword as the current matriarch of female Korean writing. This collection of nine stories is a kind of retrospective, a journey through her writing career, from her very first attempt at being published in the late sixties right up to a story from the mid-nineties.
It begins with 'The Toy Shop Woman', O's debut piece and one which won the 1968 New Writers Award. The story follows a young, emotionally-scarred woman as she raids a classroom for money and objects to sell, before walking to an old toy shop. As is to become O's trademark, the story slowly widens the scope, allowing the reader to see what has brought her to this point, a story of family hardship - and a collection of dolls. A clever, female-centred, multi-layered tale, it's very different to a lot of Korean writing
This female focus continues in the following stories, each of which features a housewife trapped in a dull relationship. In 'One Spring Day', a woman waits for a husband to return to their run-down home, a place of both comfort and boredom:
"Peace filled our home, imbued my relationship with Sungu, a peace absolute and invulnerable in which no leaf on a tree could be disturbed. But what had I sacrificed for it? Our relationship was like stagnant water - stale, peaceful."
'One Spring Day', p.18 (Columbia University Press, 2012)
Things are very similar in 'A Portrait of Magnolias', in which a woman with a troubled past attempts to move on from her cheating husband. Sadly, post-separation life is no better than the sad time she spent as a housewife.
In the title story, a couple find themselves trapped in a working-class existence, and while the wife does her best to keep things together, the man is only too eager to escape each night, unable to stand life in the apartment:
Even though he took an artisan's pride in his work, I was surprised at the loathing I detected in his voice.
"All I ever hear is the machine, whether I'm at home or on the bus. I feel like the pedals are attached to my ears. Sometimes I think I'm going crazy. Your breathing at night - that gets me thinking of the machine too. It really bothers me - I don't want to be stuck in a cage like a squirrel turning a wheel for the rest of my life."
'River of Fire', p.59
The pressure of monotonous work is crushing him, and his only outlet for the stress is a rather unusual one...
A later story, 'Morning Star', has a slightly different style. It relates a night out with five old university friends, reunited after years apart. The five are now middle-aged, each with their own families, jobs and disappointments, and the evening on the town, followed by a night spent drinking at home, allows the five to see how their lives have changed over the years - not always for the better. O switches the viewpoint between the characters, allowing the reader to see what each thinks of the others (it's not always positive).
It's in the longer, later stories that O really impresses, though. The broader canvas lets her develop the stories at a slower pace, also allowing her to insert a more detailed back story. In addition, these later, longer stories can be slightly edgier and more political. 'Lake P'aro', a story I first read earlier this year, is a perfect example of this. A middle-aged woman goes on a journey to a recently drained lake, seeking inspiration for her writing. This pleasant excursion is gradually overtaken by flashbacks to the woman's life in America, where her family moved after her teacher husband was fired for reasons unknown. The different strata of Korean history are shown in the buildings uncovered in the lake - rocks from the Kingdom of Koguryo, rice fields from the colonial period, roads from the military regime. The moral of the story seems to be that all political systems are eventually outlasted by the stones...
This idea of the contrast between present-day life and the distant past appears again in 'Fireworks'. This one is a particularly good story describing a day in the life of a family, a day on which an event celebrating their town's 'promotion' in status to a city is being held. I loved the starting scene in a classroom, a beautiful description of a lazy sunny afternoon where the students struggle to maintain interest in the teacher's dull, date-heavy history lesson:
The teacher rose and methodically erased the blackboard.
"Yi Yongjo, tell us about the founding of Koguryo."
Yongjo stared at the blank surface, desperately racking his memory. All he could remember was what he had read in a comic book - the story of Prince Hodong and Princess Nangnang, a magic drum that boomed in the absence of any human touch, and General Yon'gaesomun, who wore half a dozen daggers, who when mounting his horse used a servant's back rather than stirrups.
'Fireworks', p.98
Poor Yongjo has a preference for stories over dry dates, and it's this focus on real life over 'important' historical facts which permeates this charming story.
Earlier this year, I was able to try more of O's work: her story 'Wayfarer' in the Modern Korean Fiction collection, and several stories (including the excellent 'Spirit on the Wind') which you can find online for free. She's very much a story writer, having written just the one short novel as far as I'm aware, and the forty-page story/novella seems to be where she's most comfortable, and at her best. Over the course of her career, she's become a highly influential writer (and a very good one!), amassing an impressive body of stories concerning the role of women in society and the trauma of a country still healing its scars...
At this point, though, it's only fair to give a special mention to the Fultons, who are supreme translators in the field of Korean literature in translation. As a married couple working together, it's tempting to compare them to the Pevear and Volkhonsky translation team; however, unlike P & V, the Fultons are bringing untranslated works into English and not just making American versions of Russian classics which have already been translated. In addition to translating O Chong-hui's stories, Bruce and Ju-Chan have also worked their magic on writers like Ch'ae Yun and Cho Se-hui. However, it's with O that they've really made a mark :)
A great writer, great translators and a beautiful-looking book - it all makes for an excellent addition to my K-Lit library. O is definitely a writer I want to try more from, but sadly there's not all that much out there (she's a writer whose focus is definitely on quality over quantity). Here's hoping I manage to stumble across some more of her work soon...
*****
Footprint Books, as always, assure me that this book is available in Australia, either at bookshops or through their website :)
I haven't quite finished the first ten books in Dalkey Archive Press' Library of Korean Literature, but the next five in the series are already out, and I couldn't resist trying one of the latest batch. Number eleven is a contemporary story looking at modern Korean society and its obsession with superficiality - and for fans of Japanese literature, it might all seem oddly familiar...
*****
Park Min-gyu's Pavane for a Dead Princess (translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim, review copy courtesy of the publisher and the Australian distributor Footprint Books) has a writer looking back to the mid-eighties, a time when he arrived at the threshold of adulthood. The opening scene is of a bus arriving in the snow, bringing the writer (and the reader) to a final, heart-warming meeting between two young lovers.
Moving back a year, we learn how the two met while working in the underground car park of a busy Seoul department store. Both of them are eye-catching, but in very different ways. The narrator is a young man who stands out, having inherited his father's movie-star looks. The girl? She, as is made very clear, is totally, breath-takingly ugly...
Pavane for a Dead Princess is an easy, comforting read, a story chronicling the development of a relationship against a back-drop of near hedonistic consumerism. The two main characters, young people at odds with society, have arrived in the adult world without the appropriate social tools to survive and ignore outside pressure. It's hard to follow your own path when countless millions seem to be telling you that there's only one way to go (and it's not yours).
This is particularly true of mid-80s Seoul, a city seemingly attempting to fit decades of consumer development into a few months - this is truly the age of the commercial and the superficial:
"The world had laid down its judgement long ago. It was an age where pretty trumped justice and pretty had the last word. Nearly everything was determined at first sight, in terms of what school you went to, how much money you had, and how you stacked up in the eyes of others. Glancing at the calendar on the wall, with its picture of a provocatively posing model practically demanding our attention, I poured my friend another glass."
p.48 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014)
Having worked hard, the Korean middle classes want to enjoy their gains, and shopping has become a national past-time. In truth, though, they have been swept up in a race to buy more, spend more and become 'better', getting into debt in order to have the latest fashions. It's all seems more like hard work than real leisure.
The narrator, his girl-friend and their friend Yohan stick out in this sea of consumerism, all misfits in their own way. The narrator is a budding writer, a school drop-out recovering from the break-up of his parents' marriage (his actor father dumped the narrator's plain mother once he hit the big time...). Yohan is the foil to the introverted narrator - he's clever and witty, and he helps his friend to cope with the daily grind. However, underneath his affable exterior, there's a palpable sense of darkness waiting to emerge.
The boys' issues, however, are nothing when compared to the girl's problems. Her appearance prevents her from living a normal life (and the writer makes sure that we understand how big a problem this is). Whenever she walks down the street, people gape at her, unable to quite believe what they're seeing, and most turn away rather than keep looking at her. Her looks prevent her from getting, and keeping, decent jobs; understandably, she sees her appearance as an affliction:
"Some people might point to handicapped people and tell me things can be much worse. I'm aware there are many people who are in pain. But, although I know this will sound shameless and selfish, there were many times when I envied those people. At least the world recognizes their handicaps for handicaps. The world never accepted my darkness as a handicap, yet everyone treated me as such. My handicap was never recognized as one, although, while I don't want to admit it, it was the world that had crippled me. I had to go to the same school and wear the same clothes as other kids, but I was always treated differently. I had no choice but to live this life. That was my fate.
Ugly." (p.179)
The writer later contrasts her situation with fleeting portraits of pretty girls. Unlike the narrator's girlfriend, theirs is an easy life, life pandered to by a safety net of admirers. Coincidentally, I was reading this book when the Renée Zellweger 'controversy' erupted - a sobering reminder that it's not just 80s Korea that had a fixation on beauty...
Pavane for a Dead Princess is a touching love story (with a twist...) and a scathing indictment of modern society. It's a compelling tale, and if the themes and style sound familiar, they cetainly are. You see, there's more than a touch of the Murakamis about this one with the Japanese writer being a very obvious influence on Park. In fact, some of the writing is very reminiscent of Haruki's idiosyncratic style:
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
Her voice was tiny, but it unsettled me. Why was she sorry? She began to cry to my utter confusion. The thought crossed my mind that maybe twenty-year-old guys are like AM radios. We can turn the knob all we want, but we'll never receive that elusive signal called woman. I sat there blank as a dead radio, facing her tears. I felt I'd done something very wrong. (p.8)
That's a passage which could have come straight out of A Wild Sheep Chase or Dance, Dance, Dance... The scenes of the three friends at the run-down bar, 'Kentucky Chicken', will instantly have Murakami fans thinking of the many nights Boku and the Rat spend at J's Bar, and there are constant mentions of pop music and reading books in public places. Yes, if you wait long enough, there's also a cat ;)
Even the title is unmistakably Murakamiesque. It refers to a piece of classical music, Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte, music from an LP given to the narrator by his girlfriend on their last night together (a melancholic piano piece). If only Park had Murakami's sales, I'm sure it would soon be as frequently searched for on Youtube as the Liszt pieces from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle's The Thieving Magpie!
Park is a lot more than just a Murakami clone, though. Pavane for a Dead Princess is a straight-forward, but fascinating story, a book I flew through. I've had some issues with the translations in this series, but this one was generally good, and I found it easy to remain absorbed in the story, eager to keep turning the pages. I'd probably still recommend Jang Eun-jin's No One Writes Back as the standout of the ones I've read, but this one is definitely up there with the best. Now, if the other four new additions to the series are this good, I'd be very happy to try them. It might be a while before I finish off the last couple from the original ten ;)
*****
Footprint Books, as always, assure me that this book is available in Australia, either at bookshops or through their website :)
I've already tried a couple of novels by Hwang Sok-yong this year, so I was very happy to receive one of his books in the bundle I received recently. However, where the others I read were fairly lengthy novels (particularly The Shadow of Arms), today's choice is a much briefer affair. Nevertheless, it's a work which is very well known in Korea, one which forms an important part of his legacy...
*****
The Road to Sampo (translated by Kim U-chang, review copy courtesy of Asia Publishers) is a short story in the Modern Korean Literature Bilingual Editions series, and it's one of Hwang's more popular works. It's set in the early seventies and is a brief tale of an unlikely trio of fellow travellers walking through a wintry countryside in search of the local train station.
The story begins with Yeong-dal, a young worker who has just left a construction site which is closing down for the winter. Meeting Cheong, a fellow worker, at the side of the road, he decides to accompany him for part of the journey, and the two men are later joined by Paek-hwa, a prostitute who has run away from the café-cum-brothel she was staying at. Together, the three of them trudge through the snow, sharing stories about their lives as they go - and as poor workers in a rapidly changing landscape, they have plenty of tales to tell...
The Road to Sampo is a great story, an almost cinematic road trip (it actually was made into a film in Korea). It's a short trip, but it makes for a brief respite from the grind of daily life, an example of the typical, transient friendships of the travelling working classes of the time. In addition, the story has a beautiful winter setting, with the icy winds, the snow and the silent landscape adding to the cinematic feel.
Hwang's story is also a humorous one, with many light touches. When the (slightly naive) Yeong-dal questions Cheong about his work skills, the older man dryly hints at where he picked them up:
"Wow, having all those skills, you must feel very secure," Yeong-dal said admiringly.
"I've been doing them for more than ten years," said Cheong.
"Where did you learn them?" asked Yeong-dal.
"There's a very nice place where they teach you all those skills," answered the other man.
"I wish I could go there," said Yeong-dal naively.
But Cheong said with a bitter smile, shaking his head: "It's easy to go there, but I'm not sure you would really want to go. It is a very big place - only too big."
pp.25/7 (Asia Publishers, 2012)
Let's just say that it's unlikely Cheong ended up there of his own accord... Another memorable moment is when the two men finally catch up with the runaway Paek-hwa. She's a beautiful woman, but they don't initially see her from her best angle ;)
However, there are serious undertones to the story. The Road to Sampo is another of those stories set in a time of upheaval in Korea. The shift from an agrarian to an industrial society is in full swing, a development which has an enormous effect on the workers. There has been a massive shift from the countryside to the cities, and the poor are forced to travel to look for work. Yeong-dal is just one of the many who have been forced to leave loved ones behind in order to make ends meet.
While not the major focus of the author, another area of interest is the role of women in the story. It begins with the wife of the canteen owner, a woman who has taken Yeong-dal into her bed, being casually beaten, and the major female character is Paek-hwa, a young woman whose only chance of making a living is to trade her beauty. She certainly feisty enough, yet at twenty-two she already appears jaded, washed out. It's definitely not only the men who suffered at the time...
The Sampo of the title is Cheong's hometown, the destination he and Yeong-dal are working towards:
"Which way is Sampo?"
"South, that is, as far south as you can go," said Cheong, vaguely pointing his chin to the south.
"How big a place is that? Are there many people living there?" asked Yeong-dal.
"Ten houses or so," explained Cheong. "It's a pretty island, Sampo is. The soil is good, lots of land. Fishing is good too. You can catch as much fish as you want." (p.29)
In truth, Sampo is less a real place than an imagined idyll, a memory of the past, one which is unlikely to be found again. There's no place corresponding to the description of Cheong's Sampo in Korea, but while browsing for connections, I stumbled across a mention - in Finnish folklore... According to Wikipedia, in Finnish mythology the Sampo or Sammas was a magical artefact of indeterminate type that brought good fortune to its holder (I wonder if Hwang was aware of this...). Sadly, it's an item that proves to be rather elusive, and you sense that Cheong and Yeong-dal are also on a trip towards a place they'll never be able to reach...
*****
The Road to Sampo is another entertaining story, the short text enhanced by the added extras. There's the original Korean version, of course (still a bit too tricky for me!), with a short critical review and biography - and it's the biography that really impresses. Hwang's a great writer with a fascinating life, including trips to North Korea, exile and imprisonment. When he was younger, he left school and travelled around the country, working alongside the people Yeong-dal and Cheong are modelled upon. When one of the Nobel Prize for Literature bigwigs bemoaned the move towards insular professional writers a few weeks ago, Hwang was most definitely not one of the writers he had in mind ;)
While I wasn't always entirely convinced by the translation, the quality of story shines through, and it made me keen to try more of Hwang's work. As for the Bilingual Editions, well, they're certainly worth a try too (and if money were no object, I'd be buying up the box sets...). Head to Amazon if you like the sound of them; there are a lot to choose from :)
As some of you may have noticed, my reviewing activities haven't been limited to the blog over the past couple of months. Continuing the Korean theme which has been the backbone of my 2014 reading, I've been steadily working my way through a collection of twenty free stories from the first half of the twentieth century, all translated and put on the Internet courtesy of the nice people at the Literature Translation Institute (LTI) of Korea. But where are the reviews, I hear you ask - well, today's post looks at them in brief. For the full picture, though, I'll be pointing you in a different direction...
*****
The twenty stories have been carefully chosen and are meant to give English speakers a taste of early modern Korean literature. While the majority are in the range of twenty to thirty pages, they range from a couple of fairly brief stories to one hundred-page novella. There's also a variety of writers, with thirteen different authors represented (from memory, only two female writers, though), and the stories mainly span the last couple of decades of the colonial period, a couple coming shortly after.
Some of the better stories in the collection come from writers I was already familiar with. The two by Yi Sang ('Child's Bone' and 'Dying Words'), while not quite as good as his famous story 'Wings', are recognisably by the same writer. The same could be said for Yi Kwang-su's 'Gasil', an entertaining (if didactic) folk tale. Another well-known name is Ch'ae Man-sik, and his two contributions, 'Transgressor of the Nation' and 'Frozen Fish', are among the longer and more impressive stories.
However, there were also several good stories by writers I hadn't previously encountered. Examples include Kim Yu-jeong's humorous story 'The Golden Bean Patch' and Kim Sa-ryang's excellent piece 'Into the Light', a story originally written in Japanese, which looks at Korean-Japanese relations in Tokyo. I also enjoyed the two stories by Kim Nam-cheon, 'After Beating Your Wife...' and 'Management', both of which were slightly more complex than some of the earlier tales in the collection.
As the collection covers a relatively short period of history, it's unsurprising that there are several recurring themes. Many of the earlier stories examine the harsh life of the poor, particularly farmers, during the Japanese colonial period, with tales of hunger and drought aplenty. Women also feature heavily, but not always in a good way. Some feature mainly to be beaten or abandoned by their husbands, but others tire of a life of poverty and end up running off with richer men. As I said, there's a heavy bias towards male writers here...
Another common subject is the political side of the occupation. There are some stories where writers and intellectuals must weigh up the consequences of remaining true to their beliefs under the colonial system, and few pieces are completely free of the shadow of the Japanese presence. Even those from after liberation look back at the occupation, examining the consciences of people who didn't protest as much as they might have.
While not all of the stories are wonderful (and a few of the translations are a little stilted), this is an excellent (free!) collection of stories - so why haven't I reviewed it properly? Well, dear reader, the truth is that I already have, in great detail, on my Youtube channel! Over the past couple of months, I've recorded fifteen short videos covering all the stories and compiled them on this playlist, so if you're interested in my thoughts, just click on the link, and away you go :)
Before I leave you to check it out, though, I'll just show you where you can access the stories (which is far more important!). For Apple devices, go here; for the Google Play app, go here. And if, like me, you need the PDFs, just click on this link. There you go - lots of free stories at your fingertips :)
That's all for now, but it's far from the end of my Korean reading - or even my Youtube activities. You see, in addition to the twenty stories discussed today, LTI Korea has also provided fifteen more modern stories for everyone to try. It looks like my Youtube Channel may have a new playlist in the not-too-distant future...
