Sun-Won Hwang (1915–2000)

I didn’t know what to think of this collection. I had not read a Korean writer before, as far as I can recall. There were stories set in cities and stories set in the countryside, stories of peasants, soldiers and prostitutes, the young and the old. The language was simple, the narration straightforward. It was not until the penultimate piece, a sequence of four shorter stories called “Places of Death,” that an awareness of what I was reading came to mind. A carpenter loses his sense of smell after failing to warn his crew before the collapse of a construction tunnel. A man disembarking from a train, intent on selling at market the chicken in his sack, is accused of being a spy and tortured. A child’s classroom composition innocently describes the death of his bedridden mother. A soldier driving a truck back to base late at night kills a pedestrian. I realized that The Book of Masks is a collection of horror stories, or stories of horror, with no fearsome beasts, no bloody weapons, nothing magical or supernatural, but the horror of loneliness, the horror of wasted chances and memories returning, the horror of getting just what you want but losing everything.

A young man’s preoccupation with the imagined thoughts of a girl in his building is played out in a series of violent outbursts on the street. A peculiar relationship develops between a woman in a coma and the woman with a troubled past hired to attend to her. A reluctant student activist is rescued from a fusillade at the barricades by a woman forced to work as a prostitute during the long absences of her husband. An elderly widower, retired from a career as a concert pianist because of paralysis in his arm, is set to marry a beautiful younger woman but becomes obsessed with a fish, the last of a rare breed, living in a bowl on his kitchen table. A little girl saves a boy from drowning, twisting their fates together ever after. The memory of an accident at a church bell-tower in a country village forty years before brings a man to the funeral of a boyhood friend. A man schedules his suicide for midnight down by the river but is granted a vision of annihilation postponed in the arms of a lactating prostitute.

I was caught off guard by Hwang’s talent for telling these stories with such unadorned style, as I was startled when the old pianist pulled the rare fish from the bowl and crushed it in his fist, but I came away with an appreciation for Hwang's art.… (mer)

It is a good book. That's the first thing you want to know when you glance at a review. Once you know that, however, you realize you need some more information. Every book has someone who says it's good, and every reader's taste is matched by another reader with an opposite taste. So you would want to know my criteria for thinking a book good or bad. The problem is, this book didn't meet my usual criteria. I tend to dislike realism in literature; I prefer that the author incorporate some pure invention, something fantastic or weird either in style or content. I like Murakami, Rusdhie, Bioy Casares, Flann O'Brien, etc. Hwang's book is not of that kind. Here is a straight-forward story of realistic people grappling with an actual historical reality. Nothing magical about this realism.

Maybe I tend not to read a lot of realistic fiction because so few authors do it well. If you aren't infusing the narrative with stylistic flourishes, experimenting with point-of-view or the order of exposition, or introducing supernatural elements to create a unique effect, you're left with just the stuff of everyday life: scenic description, events, human thoughts and emotions. The author is forced to create something compelling out of only these components. As I say, so few can do it well. It's hard to make a fictional character complex yet comprehensible, believable but not mundane, sympathetic yet flawed. I found myself fascinated by Hwang's characters and actually caring about their fates almost as though they were real. That is unusual for me.

If you choose to read this book, maybe think of it as ANIMAL FARM with people, though that's not quite it. Hwang depicts the encroaching influence of Korea's northern "liberators" with a complicated concern. Through the eyes of the central character--Pak Hun, an educated landowner--you are made to feel ambivalence toward the entire scenario. There's an injustice being perpetrated, but it's a new injustice displacing an old injustice. The passive Pak watches the events without much political resentment. He doesn't feel a sense of entitlement to the material things being taken away. If anything really seems to occupy him it's the personal element, the disruption of lifelong bonds of community in the face of political reorganization, disappointment when he is spied on by a former friend, the unwillingness of those around him (like the doctor) to be associated with him. People he thought he knew are not quite the same, and that just seems to make him sad. Indeed, Pak's main preoccupation is his relationship with Ojaknyo, a young woman in his employ, and while their relationship is fraught with issues of class, it is their personal feelings as human being's toward one another that concern them. Simple emotions of attraction, sense of duty and friendship eclipse the monumental goings-on around them. Even the cruel, stupid Tosop--rabid tool of the new order--is humanized through glimpses of who he was before his whole being was reduced to class identification. Ultimately, the novel doesn't lament the advent of communism in N. Korea because it dispossessed "innocent" landowners but rather the tragedy of any ideology that disallows the existence of individual feeling and agency for the sake of a mass-movement. The power of the novel is how important the human bonds of love, family, friendship and loyalty still appear to be (and actually are) even in the face of events of massive, national significance. The real story of living still occurs on the level of people, not states. In THE DESCENDANTS OF CAIN, the rise of communism matters only as it disrupts and destroys LIVES, not wealth, not power, not ideologies, not class.

Read this book for the experience of encountering characters that you haven't met before.… (mer)

Hwang Sun Won – Trees on a slope

Original: Namudul pital e soda (koreanisch, zuerst 1960 erschienen)

Diese Novelle erzaehlt von drei befreundeten Soldaten gegen Ende des Koreakrieges (1950-53), Hyon-tae, Yun-Gu und Tong-Ho, wobei es sowohl um schreckliche Szenen aus dem Kriege geht, aber vielmehr auch um die inneren Auseinandersetzungen, innerhalb desselben Lagers, innerhalb ein und derselben Person. Im zweiten Teil begleiten wir die zwei uebriggebliebenen Hauptpersonen in den Nachkriegsjahren.

Diese Novelle hat mich auf mehreren Ebenen sehr nachdenklich gestimmt. Hyon-tae ist der selbstsichere, zielbewusste Krieger ohne Gewissensbisse, der dann aber in den Nachkriegszeiten dem Alkohohol, aber auch einer totalen Ziellosigkeit verfaellt. Tong-Ho konnte sich den Zechereien und dem Spiel mit leichten Maedchen lange Zeit nicht anschliessen, denn er blieb seiner Braut treu bis er dann aber, verfuehrt von seinen Kumpanen, sich gehen laesst und ebenfalls mitzieht. Er wird sich – so ahnt der Leser – dies nicht verzeihen, und sein Leben endet im Drama. Yun-Gu lief in dieser Zeit mit, laesst ein Maedchen in unmoeglicher Situation in einer Sackgasse. Erst in den Nachkriegsjahren nimmt er langam Abschied von diesem ziellosen, von Saufzechereien und leichtem Leben gepragten Leben Abschied und findet als Einziger quasi zurueck in die Gesellschaft indem er erfolgreich eine Huehnerfarm aufbaut...

Der Kernsatz des Buches mag wohl sein, dass der Krieg keinen ohne Schaden zuruecklaesst. Jeder traegt eine Last, von den Unschuldigsten bis zu den Schldigsten und jeder ist nicht nur allein Taeter, sondern auch Opfer, nicht allein Opfer, sondern auch Taeter. Wie Sun Won das hier umsetzt ist wirklich meisterhaft. Vielleicht laesst uns manche trockene Beschreibung einer sehr harten Begebenheit erschauern, aber ich vermute dahinter eine »koreanische Weise » zu erzaehlen.

Hwang Sun Won (1915 - 2000) war ein koreanischer Kurzgeschichtenchreiber, Novellist und Dichter. Er wurde in Taedong, im heutigen Nordkorea, geboren und kam 1946 mit seiner Familie in den Sueden Koreas. Er unterrichtete ueber dreissig Jahre lang an einer Seouler Universitaet kreatives Schreiben.

Verlag: University of Hawai'i Press (30. März 2005)
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN-10: 0824828879
ISBN-13: 978-0824828875
… (mer)

This was a very interesting book for me to read, both because of my lack of experience with Korean literature in general, as well as my lack of knowledge about this period in Korean history (the time immediately following the Communist revolution in North Korea). It was an extremely interesting novel, because it focuses on a very singular act - murder in a small town - but at the same time, it's completely without a protagonist. I don't mean this just in the "it features an ensemble cast" sort of way, but I literally mean that there is no one character that the novel focuses on as a main character. It's the complete opposite of everything I've ever been told about how a good novel should be written, or structured, and yet it works in terms of both entertainment and artistic expression. An eye-opening experience, to be sure.… (mer)