A debut by a modernist prose master more than 50 years in the making—and well worth the wait.
A collection of poignant portraits of Korean lives during a tumultuous century.
“When would the day arrive when he didn’t feel like howling in sadness?” That’s the bleak situation facing Sangjin, a writer who’s fled to the Korean countryside to wait out the end of World War II in Ch’oe’s luminous collection of stories. In the war’s final months, Japan’s defeat is expected, but what will happen after Japan’s 35-year-long occupation of Korea is over? Sangjin ponders the future and “could no longer see through the darkness to the next moment even,” Ch’oe writes in “The Barley Hump.” Translated by Poole, this collection’s publication is a major event—Ch’oe’s first appearance in English. It’s stunning to think Anglophone readers have waited some 50 years since his death to read stories of Korean society struggling under the twin traumas of Japan’s occupation and the disastrous Korean War. A longtime resident of Pyongyang, Ch’oe was an incisive chronicler of the overlooked and the marginalized, of characters whose private struggles mirrored the conflicts taking place in their world. In “Walking in the Rain,” which first brought him acclaim in 1936, the friendship between a frustrated office boy with artistic aspirations and a status-obsessed photographer reflects the clash in values between those seeking money and those with more aesthetic pursuits. Elsewhere, generational and political conflicts erupt in the difficult relationship between a dying man and his intellectual son in “A Man of No Character,” and “Patterns of the Heart” presents a harrowing portrait of a revolutionary who has given up fighting colonial oppression and succumbed to opium addiction. While any historian interested in a glimpse of Korean life would benefit from reading these stories, treating them as mere documentation undervalues Ch’oe’s literary talents. His spare, lean style and ability to capture deep pathos are as evocative as Hemingway and feel strikingly contemporary. Though little is known about him, Poole says Ch’oe enjoyed some favor in the country’s north and south but his life was upended (like everyone’s) with the war’s outbreak in 1950. What we know about his final years is vague and sad. Poole says establishing authoritative versions of the stories was complicated by Cold War censorship, but readers will be grateful for her effort.
A debut by a modernist prose master more than 50 years in the making—and well worth the wait.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780231202718
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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