In award-winning Korean author Hwang's (Princess Bari, 2019, etc.) latest novel, a successful architect from a poor family reconnects with his first love many decades later.
As the title suggests, Park Minwoo has reached his twilight years. Friends and colleagues are beginning to die. "No one should ever forget their roots," one tells him gravely, but Minwoo feels embarrassed by the thought. He grew up in a Seoul slum called Moon Hollow in "a shabby house with wooden boards instead of glass in the windows," his parents eking out a living selling fishcakes. Determined to escape, he studied hard, stayed in school, and did well on his university exams. The only other high school student in Moon Hollow was the beautiful and sought-after Cha Soona, who secretly loved him. For decades Minwoo has repressed Soona's significance to him; he married well, studied abroad, and pursued a career that helped modernize Korea. But when he receives Soona's memoir in an email, his wife has moved to the U.S. to be near their daughter, and his company is under scrutiny due to corruption scandals. Soona remembers Moon Hollow with cleareyed affection in spite of what she endured there; her account dredges up their shared past, forcing him to reconsider his achievements and reckon for the first time with what he lost. The chapters alternate between Minwoo's point of view and that of a young, struggling playwright whose connection to the story emerges only gradually. Having been imprisoned for political reasons, Hwang has a restrained, delicate touch, alive to the nuances of memory, the slipperiness of the past, and the difficult choices life forces us to make. Minwoo's reexamination of his past serves as a reminder of the communities destroyed in the search for a better, more modern Korea, the lives disrupted and displaced, and the people left behind.
Subtly political, deeply humane, a story about home, loss, and the cost of a country's advancement.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947534-66-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in...
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This incandescent portrait of suburbia and family, creativity, and consumerism burns bright.
It’s not for nothing that Ng (Everything I Never Told You, 2014) begins her second novel, about the events leading to the burning of the home of an outwardly perfect-seeming family in Shaker Heights, Ohio, circa 1997, with two epigraphs about the planned community itself—attesting to its ability to provide its residents with “protection forever against…unwelcome change” and “a rather happy life” in Utopia. But unwelcome change is precisely what disrupts the Richardson family’s rather happy life, when Mia, a charismatic, somewhat mysterious artist, and her smart, shy 15-year-old daughter, Pearl, move to town and become tenants in a rental house Mrs. Richardson inherited from her parents. Mia and Pearl live a markedly different life from the Richardsons, an affluent couple and their four high school–age children—making art instead of money (apart from what little they need to get by); rooted in each other rather than a particular place (packing up what fits in their battered VW and moving on when “the bug” hits); and assembling a hodgepodge home from creatively repurposed, scavenged castoffs and love rather than gathering around them the symbols of a successful life in the American suburbs (a big house, a large family, gleaming appliances, chic clothes, many cars). What really sets Mia and Pearl apart and sets in motion the events leading to the “little fires everywhere” that will consume the Richardsons’ secure, stable world, however, is the way they hew to their own rules. In a place like Shaker Heights, a town built on plans and rules, and for a family like the Richardsons, who have structured their lives according to them, disdain for conformity acts as an accelerant, setting fire to the dormant sparks within them. The ultimate effect is cataclysmic. As in Everything I Never Told You, Ng conjures a sense of place and displacement and shows a remarkable ability to see—and reveal—a story from different perspectives. The characters she creates here are wonderfully appealing, and watching their paths connect—like little trails of flame leading inexorably toward one another to create a big inferno—is mesmerizing, casting into new light ideas about creativity and consumerism, parenthood and privilege.
With her second novel, Ng further proves she’s a sensitive, insightful writer with a striking ability to illuminate life in America.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2429-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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