Tag: Korean fiction

Korean Fiction, For Free… (In a Limited Range of Editions)

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While I think Charles Montgomery at Korean Literature in Translation overstates things a little bit by calling it a “triumph,” it’s worth noting that LTI Korea has released a set of twenty early modern Korean texts for free. (That is, early 20th century texts: “early modern” begins much later in Korean lit than English lit, where it’s used to talk about Shakespeare.) The reason I think it’s an overstatement to call this a triumph has nothing to do with the translations–of which I’ve only read a little so far, though what I’ve seen looks good–but with the media in which …

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Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, and Some Thoughts on Culture-Specific Modes of Reading

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Last semester, a student of mine gave me a paperback copy of the English translation of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. It was a very kind gesture, and I appreciated it very much. This whole culture of gifting professors–sometimes before exams, which is a little uncomfortable, but more often after–is rather nice. I’ll be honest, though: while some mainstream Korean literature I’ve found enjoyable, a lot of it leaves me kind of cold, for reasons that remind me of things my own students say when I ask them to interpret texts. I find that the standard mode of …

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I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young Ha Kim (Translated by Chi-Young Kim)

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Having read and very much enjoyed the Portable Korean Library translation of “The Photo-Shop Murders” and especially “Whatever Happened to the Guy in the Elevator,” I went into this book expecting something dark, funny, and entertainingly disturbing. Kim scores on about half of those expectations: this “novel” (at 120 pages, it’s more of a novella, really) is somewhat disturbing and rather dark. There are entertaining and funny moments, but I was in fact a little bewildered by the book. It certainly didn’t seem to me to be written by the same person who’d written “Whatever Happened to the Guy Stuck …

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