Although lovers of international fiction can find a number of novels from Japan, China, and other Asian countries available in English, the number of novels from Korea is remarkably small. Though I actively look for novels from as many countries as possible, I have, in fact, reviewed only one other Korean novel on this website to date – Three Generations, by Yom Sang-Soep, a classic written in 1931. Kyung-sook Shin’s new novel, I’ll Be Right There, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, has therefore introduced me to a new, contemporary literary world, and I hope that other readers interested in unusual and rewarding fiction from an author who is almost unknown in the English-speaking world will feel as enriched by her work as I do. I’ll Be Right There takes place during the turbulent 1980s, a time in which Korean students demonstrated against the military dictatorship which had seized their country in a coup in 1979. It was partly because of these demonstrations, leading to the well-publicized torture death of a student, that the country’s leadership finally announced in 1987 that a direct election of the President would finally take place.
Read Full Post »
A novel so rich it is difficult to describe in anything less than superlatives, Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Sound of Things Falling mesmerizes with its ideas and captivating literary style, while also keeping a reader on the edge of the chair with its unusual plot, fully developed characters, dark themes, and repeating images. Set in Colombia, the novel opens in Bogota in 2009, with Antonio Yamarra, a law professor in his late twenties, reading a newspaper story about a male hippopotamus which had escaped from the untended zoo belonging to former drug lord Pablo Escobar, who was shot and killed in 1993. The hippo, living free on the huge Escobar property for many years, had eventually wreaked havoc in the surrounding countryside until it was shot and killed by a marksman. The newspaper’s image of the slaughtered hippo brings back traumatic memories for Yamarra – real memories involving a former acquaintance, Ricardo Laverde, whom he had known for a few months in 1996, until Laverde’s death later that year, and more subtle images of a family destroyed and some possible connections to Colombia’s on-going war against drugs. Throughout the thirty-year time span of the novel, author Vasquez keeps the novel moving forward. Virtually every image in the novel connects with similar images in other times, and as time passes, the reader comes to accept that “The great thing about Colombia [is] that nobody’s ever alone with their fate.”
Read Full Post »
Already optioned for a miniseries by the producers of Downton Abbey, this novel has everything that will make this projected series a huge, popular success – a young, ingratiating main character who bumbles along as he tries to sort out his life; a woman to whom he becomes inadvertently engaged and who turns out to be a character worthy of great empathy; another woman who has still not recovered from her loss during World War I; and a Welsh setting in 1924 in Narberth, a small, rural town in Pembrokeshire in which everyone knows everyone else’s business. World War I is over, and the many young men from Narberth who were killed in the war have left behind broken hearts, ruined lives, and devastated families. Young men like Wilfred Price, who have not served in battle, have escaped many of the emotional horrors of the war, insulated from this reality because their professions have been considered essential to their community. Readers who yearn for an old-fashioned tale in which time seems to have stopped will cheer this novel which features fully developed characters who yearn for happiness and do what they can to achieve it within the limits of their society, a welcome respite from some of the harsh realities of twenty-first century life – and a story which will lend itself beautifully to a British mini-series centered on the life of a common man, instead of an aristocrat.
Read Full Post »
There is nothing small-scale about Lily King’s new novel, Euphoria. Here she creates a novel on the grandest scale in terms of themes and ideas, at the same time that she also dramatically changes the time frame and setting from the US in the present to areas of New Guinea so remote that they have never been explored by “outsiders.” American anthropologist Nell Stone and her Australian husband Schuyler Fenwick have been in New Guinea studying previously unknown tribes since 1931, and now, almost two years later, Nell is more than ready for change. For the past six months they have been studying the warlike and cannibalistic Mumbanyo tribe, though most of that study has been done by Fen. Now, however, Nell is weary and frightened of the fearsome Mumbanyos with their bloodlust and their penchant for discarding babies in the river. A meeting with Andrew Bankson, a British anthropologist, gives them a chance to study yet another group, more peaceful, and the three scientists begin to share more than just their research. Based, in part, on the life of anthropologists Margaret Mead, her husband Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson in 1933.
Read Full Post »
Author Amanda Michalopoulous develops her novel from the point of view of Maria Papamavrou, who is nine in the late 1970s, after the military dictatorship in Greece has ended; in her twenties in the 1990s; and in her mid-thirties in the early twenty-first century, and the novel shifts back and forth among these three time periods. When the novel first opens, Maria, now a thirty-five-year-old teacher in an elementary school, is confronting a difficult little girl who has just moved to Athens from Paris. Reminded of her own difficult past, Maria then reminisces about own life when she was a similar age as her new student. Maria arrives in Athens as a nine-year-old from Nigeria, where her father has been working. Her first days of school, filled with humorous detail, endear her to the reader immediately, as she gets into a fight with another student, deals with another who wants to know if a lion ate the missing part of her little finger, and what “fart on my balls” means. The arrival of Anna Horn, another new student, is the highpoint of her life, however, and when the imperious Anna rudely corrects the teacher, announcing that “We’re not immigrants, we’re dissidents,” Maria feels as if she has found a best friend – until Anna declares that “there are no dissidents in Africa. My mother says you’re racists who exploit black people.” Despite this inauspicious beginning, Anna and Maria become best friends for life – sort of.
Read Full Post »
