4) Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that and what counts as excessively subtle. He’s subtle and literary and doesn’t spell everything out for his reader, but my preference runs to authors who know to handle ambiguity and who paint the world in shades of gray Hwang does it masterfully, IMHO, and his stories repay very careful reading and rereading–it’s like peeling away the layers of an onion. Re marketing: In 2010 Korean literature may be (or can afford to be) looking for a breakout author like Kim Young-ha, but in the 1980s/1990s, translation was much more about getting Korea’s finest literary talents out into the world. Let me also add that I think that Hwang is one of the writers of his generation who was most able to hit upon universal themes; you don’t really need to be Korean to appreciate what is happening in his work, which is not always as true of his contemporaries.

5) Will be interested to know what you think. Let me know what you make of the title story–it’s only a couple of pages long, but packs a lot of brilliance into those couple of pages.

1) In retrospect I was so bummed out by the first two stories in this collection that I was too hard on “Bibari.”

2) I’d like to make clear that when I said “Descendants of Cain” was “horrific,” I meant the semi-historical tale it tells. I like the book, though I would NEVER have chosen it for translation into English, as it seems intentionally devised to scare off western readers. YMMV

3) No matter how subtle “Sonagi” may be, no matter how many lost maidenheads it artfully conceals, it is at heart the Korean equivalent of “Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” I liked Kim Yong-ik’s “Love in Winter” for a different version of the same story, far more artfully told.

4) Haerim says something I find quite interesting, certainly true, and to me damning: “As the other reviewer you cited suggests Hwang has a knack for drawing out a telling and subtle detail and leaving it up to the reader for interpretation.” To me this is NOT what you translate into English for a variety of reasons. I am currently teaching a graduate class I made up called “Created in Translation – in this class one of the things I argue is that translating works that are excessively subtle is not the route to get your Target Culture interested. If it is subtle in native language, the chances it will be impenetrable in the target language increase greatly. I should note, my idea of success is when Korea will have, as Japan currently does, stock characters built into the mind of the English-language reader (e.g. Samurai, Geisha, Kamikaze Pilot). I am, after all, a greasy-pole climbing marketing dude. ^^

5) I have had “Book of Masks” on my desk to read for nearly 6 months, and will get to it next. I thought “Cranes” was an excellent and evocative story (not too subtle for my linear Occidental brain to get) and your recommendation tips the scale.

6) The “allegory” that Tuttle proposes is probably there – I often read too literally. Still, I’m not sure what I’m to make of it other than the commonplace, and common to all places, recognition that journalists and writers are pretty much like scavengers.
I keed!

Sorry to hear that Hwang didn’t do it for you. I think that at his best he is, hands down, Korea’s finest writer. It’s been a good fifteen or twenty years since I read A Man or Bibari, but my recollection of the former in particular is that it was a very powerful and disturbing story, told in a spare, understated, subtle style. As the other reviewer you cited suggests Hwang has a knack for drawing out a telling and subtle detail and leaving it up to the reader for interpretation. I really recommend the collections Book of Masks and Shadows of a Sound, both edited by Martin Holman. I don’t think Hwang’s novels are as strong because the intricacy of what he is trying to achieve is hard to over a couple hundred pages of text, but he truly excels at the short story.

And there is much more going on in Sonagi, I think, than meets the eye. A shame that the story became a middle school staple because it has colored perceptions of the story as something very straightforward and simple (there is pretty clearly a symbolic loss of virginity that takes place in the story, but don’t even try to go there with readers who remember it as a straightforward “sunsuhan” tale of puppy love….).

Now you tell me! Actually, I liked the first story quite well, which I took to be an allegory about the writer in his society. I didn’t think much of the other two, mainly because of the sexual politics and the fact both protagonists are inexplicable losers.

But I found the translation to be well-written, and I think the style, “tinged with lyricism” as I put it in my review, allows the reader to use his intelligence, doesn’t beat you over the head with symbolism as sometimes happens in Korean lit.