http://www.ktlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/1205120515_charles.mp3

for download or iPhone.

Krys Lee (by Mat Douma)

“It’s wrong how we pretend we keep going forward.”

Krys Lees’ Drifting House is the work of an accomplished author who looks, with unsparing eye, at some of the costs of living in the interstitial spaces between countries and cultures. In some ways reminiscent of Ch’oe Yun or Cho Se-hui, Lee is a master of demonstrating alienation and revealing how the conceptual and cultural terra firma up which we build our “safe as houses” lives can shift and drift to leave us without support.

Drifting House, is also a catalogue of the historical wounds that have beset Korea and Lee lays bare these wounds of Korea and draws the reader into this fractured world. The disharmony, pain and sorrow that imbue these stories can be disconcerting and not entirely comfortable. Characters are alienated, from others and from themselves. Situations are fraught with hidden motivations, lurking dangers, emotional catastrophes.

Ms Lee creates a universe of damaged people, then lets them go to deal with their personal fates – the results are never timid and the stories are never small. Drama begets drama. Consequently, the stories are often horrific. A daughter sleeps with her father; a boy watches his father throw himself into the Han River; a boy kills his sister in order to survive. Ms. Lee does not work in constricted spaces. As she noted in an interview with KTLIT, she thinks of herself as a novelist currently working short stories. These stories sting.

In each of her stories, Lee creates a recognizable universe. Using short and spare dialogue that manages to realistically place the brutal and inexplicable into quotidian spaces, primarily in a geography of pain. Another point of comparison might be poet Kim Hyesoon who shares Lee’s love of the visceral. Consider the following passage from A Temporary Marriage, the first story in the book, a story of a woman trying to find her daughter:

She took her sewing scissors and ran the edge along the back of her thigh. The pain erased all grief, stripped her of camouflage. A wound so bright it looked pasted on blossomed on her leg. There was no symmetry yet, so she ran the scissors down the other thigh.
….
There was only the world narrowing to predictable pinpoints of pain … her wounded body continued its ancient song. (23)

The second story, At the Edge of The World, explores a theme that Lee returns to, the broken family, or the imperfectly constructed one. The ‘hero’ the precocious Mark Lee, who lives with his mother and second father.

Lee is deft with descriptions as when Mark describes the daughter of new boarders as wearing, “A fancy dress resembling lemon meringue that covered nine-tenths of her, making the friendly sun her nemesis.”

The new boarders are shamanic, Mark’s parents putatively Christian, which causes predictable difficulties and not so predictable ones. Further, Mark falls in love with the daughter and even more drama ensues. As the story ends, at the edge of the Grand Canyon, Lee allows the reader and her characters as much of a grace note as her dark universe allows.

The Pastor’s Son is another story of a shattered family, rebuilt and then broken once more, into even tinier shards. The pastor loses his first wife, marries a second, and returns to Seoul, where it all ends poorly.

The Goose Father is an amusing story of a man of very certain routines whose routines are disrupted in the most fundamental way by the arrival of a boarder and an actual goose into his life. A Goose Father (기러기 아빠 ) is a Korean father working in Korea while his wife and children live in an English-speaking country for their children’s education. The Goose Father also ends on a kind of grace note, though it is an ambiguous one as well.

The Salaryman is both a snapshot of the IMF crisis and a reflection on some of the cost of Korea’s economic sense. The story is told in the second person, a narrative remove that works well, makes the story seem even more clinical. It is also quite recognizable if you live in Seoul. This is an example of Lee’s skill in that she takes you into a story that was in fact quite common at that time, though might seem ludicrous to an English-language reader, and pulls you entirely into the story, with each character, detail, and scene economically inscribed into words and by the time you arrive at the last two sentences, again brilliantly concise, they completely sum up all that has gone before.

The title story is Drifting House and it is, there is no other word for it, brutal. It would ruined by too much explanation here, but in setting and topic it presents a world utterly without sentimentality or sympathy. It is described in a way that might be called delicate if it wasn’t in the service of such a brutal plot. No reader will walk away from this story without considering what it says about North Korea at the present time.

A Small Sorrow is a story of infidelity, possibly hope, and also contains the only typo I found in the book, when ‘naval’ is substituted for ‘navel.’ The quotidian nature of this story allows the reader to surface for air before the next story The Believer returns the book to its socially and psychologically dystopian roots.

The first paragraph of The Believer is another example of Lee’s brilliant prose:

God was there, God was everywhere. She saw Him in the penumbra of her father’s doubt and her mother’s anger plummeting out rust red. She saw Him in the vast, ululating dreams of all the people she met, and the nebulae that she sometimes woke ecstatically to, a monster gliding along the sea’s black floor, traveling tirelessly despite the weight of human catastrophe, its prehistoric face the face of all time, the face of God.

The writing is brilliant, an unusual composite of Breece D’J Pancake and early Clive Barker. Unfortunately God is in the details, and most of the details in The Believer are of the horrorshow sort. This story manages to fit two gruesome plot twists, into a relatively short meditation on God, sin, and a vast and empty universe and future.

The final story is Beautiful Women a coming-of-age story, and perhaps a story of children revisiting the mistakes of their parents, told across a background of foreign soldiers. Beautiful Women seems, in some ways to be of a different piece than the other stories in Drifting House, and if these stories are chronologically arranged, may suggest a slightly different focus for Lee in the future.

As an unfortunate sidenote, the booksleeve reveals how impoverished the idea of Korean literature is as it compares Krys Lee to another Lee, Chang Rae, who couldn’t be a worse comparison. The comparison seems made solely on the basis of shared ethnicity, as if there were no other legitimate comparisons to be made.

One other cavil is that Lee occasionally throws in Romanized versions of Korean text, words that no English-language reader will be able to understand or look up, since the Hangeul is not present. This is a kind of in-between stance that doesn’t make sense to me.

A small cavil, anyway, in the case of this book, brilliantly realized and written, if only to be read in the absence of gas-lines, sharp objects, or rope.^^

Pick it up.

Unfortunately (though I understand why) these videos cannot be embedded and neither can a service like KeepVid download them, so you’ll have to watch them streaming from the site. Still, this is an epic service and it includes movies of books like:

Obaltan – Aimless Bullet by Yi Beomseon
The Ball Shot by a Midget – The Dwarf by Cho Se-hui
The Taebaek Mountains – by Jo Jung-Ran

I’ve already watched Obaltan from a torrented download (worth watching just for the deranged representation of the grandmother) and it was difficult to find and took forever to download, so this is a MUCH better system.

Whether you are a fan of Korean cinema, or want to see how some of these classic novels have been adapted for the screen, this site is worth checking out!

I’ll be looking at some of these, in the days to come, to see how they compare to the books. I couldn’t be more excited!

LOL.. true to its epic nature, The Taebaek Mountains is longest at an epic 2 hours and 44 minutes. Might as well read the book!

Announcements:

• Asia Literary Review Publishes Spring Volume: 100% Korean Fiction (covered here on KTLIT)
• Friends of  KTLIT , and even occasional commenters, Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton have a translation of Ch’ae Mansik’s awesome, My Innocent Uncle in the new NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF WORLD LITERATURE third edition. (Covered here on KTLIT)
• Knowledge Pen will be publishing  Taebaek Mountain Range by Jo Jung Rae. (Covered here on KTLIT)

Finally, a brief discussion on where to find English bookstores that also carry translations of Korean literature.

http://www.ktlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/1205120508_charles.mp3

click her for download or iPhone.

The Men in the Mirror

A super-interesting take on North-Korean-Literature from the “A Year of Reading the World” website. The first post talks a little bit about My Life and Faith, a memoir by Korean Army war correspondent and ardent DPRK patriot Ri In Mo.

Which North Korean mouthpiece Cao de Benos  (more about/from him later) says contains

a point of view completely unknown in the West…that of utter love and devotion and sacrifice for a country, political system, and especially leadership, that (most) of the rest of the world prefers to despise and hate.

londonchoirgirl (the blogger, who also writes for the Huffington Post under the unlikely nom de plume. “Ann Morgan!”) ultimately concludes that the book is interesting, but cliched and hypocritical, noting:

as Mr Cao de Benos confirmed to me, variations on this story – books ‘showing honour, loyalty and sacrifice for the motherland’ – are the only narratives allowed in the DPRK. Reading the world would not be an option there. And no amount of passion, rhetoric or idealism can make up for that.

 In a Huffington Post article londonchoirgirl (LCG) further explains Mr De Benes through his website:

Set up in 2000 by the pioneering Spaniard Alejandro Cao de Benos (the first, if not only, foreigner to be granted a North Korean passport and allowed to work for the government) the official website of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Korean Friendship Association proclaims its mission to be ‘building international ties in the fields of culture, friendship, diplomacy and business’.

LCG’s interaction with De Benos are pretty interesting as when she asks for North Korea fiction he responds:

“I am sorry but do not know of any adult fiction since the times of the creation of the Republic. All literature was politically oriented for setting the base of the new socialist country.

“Books, films or cartoon in DPRK must have the meaning, moral and ideology. There is no adult fiction because all books published are either poems or based in historical facts.”

This causes LCG to ponder, because she knows that she has read North Korean fiction (and not just in their often laughable official press releases) and as she thinks about these two things she comes to a clever conclusion:

Then it struck me that perhaps the word “fiction” was the problem. If you understood it in its negative sense, meaning “fabrication” or “lies”, then there was clearly no room for it in a country where all literature is believed to be “based in historical facts.”

Which seems like an accurate way of reconciling statements with reality. In fact, I’d argue that this analysis is good even if you take away the perjorative “fabrication” or “lies.” Even “made up” or even “fanciful” would work in this argument if you accept that literature is based in historical facts.

Another data point might be found in this description of one aspect of North Korean fiction from Open Doors:

The “regeneration” of a Korean Christian was another favorite topic of North Korean fiction of the late 1950s. A protagonist of such stories was initially misled by scheming missionaries and their willful collaborators and foolishly became a Christian, but then some incident or bitter personal experiences helped him or her to discover the depraved nature of Christian teaching. Of course, he or she rejected the “imperialist ideological poison” and led others to eventual enlightenment.

Because, of course this is fiction in the written sense, but fits into the Northern Korean model of fiction as historical fact supporting the regime.

In any case, as I mentioned in comments elsewhere, I have ordered Korean Short Stories: A Collection from North Korea, which should broaden my understanding, although the titles alone hint at a certain juche-alignment^^:

History of Iron Pyon Hui Gun
Happiness Sok Yun Gi Ogi Chon Se Bong
Fellow Travellers Kim Byong Hun
Everyone in Position! Om Dan Ung
Unfinished Sculpture Ko Byong Sam

Found on the Web

Once again, a trio of things that I found quite interesting, but couldn’t make into  complete posts.

• If, like me, you like to visit the museums, home-towns, etc. of writers, you will be interested in London Korea Links’ visit (almost?) to the tomb of Park Kyung-Ni (the author of the epic Land, which LKL also discusses here)

• A bit late, but an article from the Korea Times focusing on the dangers of poor translators and, happily, the dangers of underpaying and under-valorizing translators. It contrasts the success of Kim Chi-Young (Please Look After Mom) and the failure of the Korea-EU FTA documents, which apparently contained 200 errors.

• Last, but not least, from Between the Tracks and the River an outside review of Kapitan Ri (in some collections Kapitan Lee) by Chon Kwangyong, a brilliantly funny story of a multiple-collaborator making his slippery way through life. Kapitan Ri can be found in the collection Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction as well as in Flowers of Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories.

This includes a brief interview with Shin, herself.

The folks at the Review have announced:

The Asia Literary Review is pleased to announce the publication of our spring issue. It will be in the post to subscribers on 8 May and available in bookshops and online thereafter. Our iPad app and eBook editions launch on the same day.

This edition focuses on Korea, both North and South, and includes an interview with Man Asian Literary Prize-winner Shin Kyung-sook; fiction by Kim Young-ha, Han Yujoo and Park Mingyu; poetry by the pre-eminent writer Ko Un and North Korean defector Jang Jin-sung; an essay by Korea expert Michael Breen and an article on North Korean cinema by Daniel Levitsky. We also feature a graphic novel from North Korea, the work of South Korean artist Won Seoung Won and a photo essay from North Korea by Simon Cockerell of Koryo Tours.

We have an email in to Kelly Falconer of the Review, and she will shortly be sending a list of places in Korea (and around the world) at which the Review can be purchased.

Anyone in Hong Kong should try to wrangle a ticket to the launching event at which Shin Kyung-sook, author of Please Look after Mother, will be guest of honour. The event is held in association with the Asia Society Hong Kong Center: http://asiasociety.org/hong-kong/events/please-look-after-mother

You can contact the Asia Literary Review right here at this link, for more information.

http://www.ktlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/1205120501_charles.mp3

Download or iPad here

Knowledge Pen is proud to announce the signing of a contract with Jo Jung Rae, a prominent contemporary Korean author, to translate and publish Taebaek Mountain Range (in Korean:태백산맥) into both English and Russian.

A summary of the story:

Taebaek Mountain Range tells the story of Korea’s partition into North and South after its liberation from the Japanese occupation at the end of the Forties. This period of tremendous social and political upheaval has defined Korea’s destiny as a divided country. For Jo Jung Rae, understanding Korea’s past holds the key to the future – to resolving the ongoing confrontation between North and South Korea.

The book is long, how long is difficult to tell, but translated into French it is reproduced in 10 “Tomes” (lol!) the last of which weighs a pound in shipping! The always useful LIST Magazine has a lengthy article on the book, here (by the translator of the French version), which notes that in Korea the book has already gone through a remarkable 200 printings. There is also a museum.

Taeback Mountain Range has already been made into a successful movie in Korea, The Tae Baek Mountains, directed by Im Kwon-taek and starring Ahn Seong-ki, Kim Myeong-kon, Kim Gap-su, Shin Hyeon-jun, Oh Jeong-hae.

It is difficult to say when the book will actually come out, with the website coyly noting, “The English translation of the first volume of the novel is due to be completed by October 2012,” which predicts nothing about publication.