Lee writes with a clarity and simplicity of style that discloses deep and conflicting emotions about cultural identity.
Affecting stories about the conflicts between Korean and American culture.
Lee tends to focus on domestic relationships, the tensions—sometimes unbridgeable—between husband and wife, between parent and child. In the opening story, “A Temporary Marriage,” Mrs. Shin saves money to travel from Seoul to southern California to find her daughter Yuri, who she feels has been “kidnapped” and spirited away to America by her ex-husband. In the suburbs of Los Angeles she shares a home with Mr. Rhee, a stranger but fellow-countryman, and fears he might have romantic designs on her. Desperate to locate her daughter, Mrs. Shin hires a detective, Mr. Pak, who eventually locates Yuri, only to find that her daughter has essentially forgotten her, poisoned by the bitterness of her ex-husband as well as by the cultural divide between Korea and the U.S. In “The Pastor’s Son,” a woman makes her husband, Pastor Ryu, promise to marry her old childhood friend, Hyeseon Min, after she dies. The pastor and Hyeseon travel from California back to Seoul for a traditional Korean wedding, but the pastor’s new wife is distressed to discover this marriage of convenience involves no love on the part of the pastor. The heartbreaking “The Salaryman” presents the depressed economic conditions in Korea following the economic bust of 1997. Lee traces the misfortunes of Mr. Seo, who loses his job and then his wife and family. He winds up on the street with a sign around his neck, begging for food and fighting off other “beggars.” “At the Edge of the World” focuses on the split identity of Myeongseok Lee, a prodigy who goes by his Korean name at home and by “Mark” at school.
Lee writes with a clarity and simplicity of style that discloses deep and conflicting emotions about cultural identity.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02325-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first collection of ten thematically linked stories, each of which deals with Britain's experience of France, from a sophisticated observer of both countries. Barnes's Francophilia has previously found expression in such novels as Flaubert's Parrot (1985) and Talking It Over (1991). The stories range widely, from a hauntingly dramatic tale of the persecution of a 17th-century village's forbidden religious practices ("Dragons") to a discursive medley of memories (in "Tunnel") indulged during a train ride to Paris in the year 2015 by the elderly English writer to whom we've been listening for longer than we'd suspected. The latter piece demonstrates the signal weaknesses of Barnes's fiction: a tendency to overload frail narrative situations with extravagant quantities of specific information (in this case, about the history, commerce, literature, viticulture, and Lord knows what-an-else of la belle France), and a self-conscious density of aper‡u and epigram so oppressive that the book fairly grows heavy in your hands. Such ostentation reduces to trivia a promising tale ("Experiment") about a stuffy Englishman's "undeserved entr‚e to the Surrealist circle" and a snappish satire on literary conferences ("Gnossienne")—and, conversely, swells to shapelessness the narrative of a cricketer whose visits to France climax in the unhappy year of 1789 ("Melon") and an otherwise strongly imagined and beautifully structured story ("Junction") about the building of the Rouen and Le Havre Railway. The better stories—often very good indeed—include a wry account of two unmarried English ladies relocated in the French countryside and struggling to operate a vineyard ("Hermitage"); a compassionate (though overextended) portrayal of a lonely Jewish woman who mourns for many decades afterward the death of her brother on the Somme battlefields ("Evermore"); and the superbly witty "Interference," which describes with delicious comic detail the final days of a vain and waspish English composer in the adopted country that good-naturedly attempts to tolerate him. A very uneven display of this very skillful author's obvious talents.
Pub Date: March 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44691-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
A powerful debut collection of eight stories (two previously published in Story magazine) that are linked thematically: They're all about man and dog, though not in any sappy sense, and with no cute anthropomorphizing. In ``Bill,'' an octogenarian feels closer to her dying poodle than to her own family, and cooks up a grand feast the night before he's put to sleep; in ``Agnes of Bob,'' a childless widow realizes that her husband cared more about his dog, Bob, than about her, and the dog's presence reminds her of the emptiness in her marriage; in ``A Blessing,'' a pregnant woman is disabused of any cute notions about dogs when a trip to the country to buy one ends with an act of brutality. No sentimentality mars these gritty narratives. ``The Wake'' is a wildly implausible piece about a bachelor whose ex- girlfriend returns to him in a box via UPS. He's more concerned with the dead dog now rotting under his house than with her, his obsession offering a deliberately unsubtle correlative to a failed relationship. ``Seeing Eye,'' a vignette about a dog working for a blind man, compares its present life of responsibility to its former life roaming free on a farm. The full resonance of one of Watson's dominant themes (men-as-dogs, elemental in their needs, faithless in their couplings) emerges in the three best stories. ``The Retreat'' finds a few soon-to-be divorced men hiding out in the country, drinking, hunting, sloughing off responsibility. ``Kindred Spirits'' layers the metaphorical relationships in its story-within-a-story about a dog tracking a wild boar in the Florida swamp. The tale turns into a not very subtle parallel to the narrator's present cuckolding by his business partner. The title piece is an elegy to a dog-like life of wildness, freedom, animalism no longer available to men. Watson's muscular prose stands shoulder to shoulder with the best cracker realists, from Faulkner to Larry Brown. (Regional author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03926-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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