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
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.
Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.
One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593418918
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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