Described as a “masterpiece of Korean fiction of the twentieth century” and as “one of the outstanding literary achievements during Korea’s colonial era,” Three Generations, written in 1931, has recently been translated into English for the first time. The novel traces three generations of one family–the Jo family–consisting of the grandfather and family patriarch, his middle-aged son (Sang-hun, and his wife), and Sang-hun’s 23-year-old son Deok-gi (and his wife and baby), the character around whom most of the action revolves. The family lives in Seoul in a large traditional house with inner and outer quarters, separate living areas for the several families, and spaces for the family’s servants. Within the household, traditional family values are being threatened. Arranged marriages are sought and performed (even for Deok-gi) to protect the family’s wealth, and real affection is not a requirement since the taking of concubines is accepted. No legal obligations exist between men and these concubines if the women have children, and their difficult lives come under scrutiny here.
Read Full Post »
The last novella written by acclaimed Italian author Romano Bilenchi before his death in 1989, The Chill, written in 1982, is a coming-of-age story so universal that it could just as easily have been written in 1902 or 2002. Set in the mid-1920s, in the hill towns between Siena and Florence, the novella recreates the story of an unnamed narrator dealing with the pangs of adolescence so skillfully that the reader can easily associate it with the author’s own childhood—and though the setting is dramatically different from that of J. D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, or any of the other coming-of-age novels one might recall, the issues are similar, if not identical in many respects. With its focus on family history, death, friendship, love, betrayal, and revenge, this novella deals with the most important of life’s issues.
Read Full Post »
Written in 1958, when the author was only twenty-three, this debut novel is stunning for its depiction of two societies–the society of peasant villagers who live in a remote and nearly inaccessible mountain village, and a society created by young delinquents when they are abandoned and blockaded inside this small village. Away from normal society, the boys are free to express their own emotions, and the narrator and others quickly show their inner humanity. The narrator’s much younger brother, an innocent, depends upon the narrator, who is protective and warm towards him, with several people protecting also the young daughter of the woman who died from plague, a girl who was abandoned when the villagers evacuated and left all the “undesirables” behind. As the boys help each other, the author creates a real sense of pathos about their sad predicaments. Passages of great beauty–especially the morning in which they discover snow–contrast with the misery of their attempts at survival. Five days later, everything changes.
Read Full Post »
Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India will expand and alter your view of India, Pakistan, and the British Raj. Using a child-narrator, a literary device over-employed and often unsuccessful, this author has found the perfect vehicle for conveying the heart-breaking story of the Partition of India in l947, without being coy and without descending into bathos. Lenny, as the child of a Parsee family, roams freely through the Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, and Parsee society of her household and neighborhood in Lahore. Because she is lame and receiving private schooling, she is at home when momentous events and important conversations occur, and because she is very young and has no ethnic biases, she observes the disintegration of her society with the puzzlement of an outsider.
Read Full Post »
Sir Edward Feathers, known as “Old Filth,” is, ironically, “spectacularly …ostentatiously clean.” His nickname derives from the fact that as a lawyer, he “Failed In London, Tried Hongkong.” A “Raj Orphan,” Filth is a child of British civil servants of the Empire in Malaya. Like other Raj children, he is sent back to England, alone, at the age of five or six, to begin school in a country he’s never seen among people he does not know. Gardam writes a powerful character study of this intriguing character whose fate it was “always to be left and forgotten.” Now in his early eighties and living in Dorset, his wife dead, he reminisces about the past and hints at some terrible event that took place when he was eight, living in Wales with Ma and Pa Didds, who took care of him and two young cousins. Sophisticated and subtle, this novel, shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005, is also compulsively readable with its poignant scenes and ironic humor. (A Favorite of 2006)
Read Full Post »
