Southerners, Northerners: A Novel

by Ho-Chul Lee, Ho-Ch'ol Yi

Translated in close consultation with the author by Andrew Peter Killick and Sukyeon Cho. Shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, when he was eighteen, Lee Ho-Chul was drafted into the North Korean army. Southerners, Northerners (Namny k saram pungny k saram) is a fictionalized account of his inglorious yet dramatic experiences as a raw recruit and, soon afterward, as a prisoner of war. Beginning with some fascinating vignettes of North Korean high school life and ending with a narrow escape from death, the story offers a unique perspective on the early phases of the war and its everyday realities, from the tragic to the farcical. But Southerners, Northerners is far more than a war memoir. The author’s encounters with men from South Korea, first as volunteers in the North Korean army and later as military police and guards, provoke a searching examination of the difference in ethos that had already emerged between the two Koreas. Moreover, the events of the story constantly spark flashbacks and foreshadowings that stretch from the author’s childhood in what was then a Japanese colony to his later years as a dissident in South Korea. This gives the novel a rich texture of association in which the wartime story becomes a focal point for a broad vision of North and South Korea through half a century of history. Ultimately, one man’s experience becomes a prism through which are refracted the international forces that have made the Korean peninsula today almost the last outpost of the Cold War. While this and other works of Lee Ho-Chul have been translated into many languages, this is the first time a complete novel by this major figure in contemporary Korean literature has been published in English. The novel won the prestigious Daesan Literary Award for Fiction when it was published in 1996.

229 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

In an era of novels over-the-top novels of intense artificiality, "Southerners, Northerners" by Lee Ho-Chul, a Korean writer, comes across as naive and in some ways refreshing. It is not, strictly, speaking a translation of a novel, but instead of a collection of newspaper pieces rearranged chronologically, that reflect the writer's experience during the war. It hearkens back less to the great modernist novels than to "The Red Badge of Courage". The story begins during the Korean War at a time when the South is driving North toward where the narrator is studying. He and a number of comrades are recruited into the Northern Army and, with meager training, are sent to blunt the south's advance. He starts out naive, a believer in the Northern cause, but cannot help noticing that the Marxist, supposedly classless society and army of his side are in fact rife with factions and power struggles, some of them lethal. His tone is neutral, although he is clear that he does not care for certain comrades. But his description of this jockeying for power begins a quiet erosion of his faith. The officers drink in fancy train cars. The political types, some of them Southern Communists who have moved north to join the cause, are bullies and, in the end, often frauds. Teachers disappear. His suicide brigade disintegrates before he is forced into battle and, in disorganized flight, he and other members of the unit are captured by the Southern Army. In captivity he discovers that, contrary to the propaganda he has been fed, the Southerners are not uniformly brutish. Neither side comes off as heroic; there are honest Northerners and harsh and disrespectful Southerners. (The author wound up in the South, but was no blind supporter, protesting its dictatorship in the 70s). Unlike Henry Fleming, the narrator never has the opportunity to discover whether he is afraid, courageous, or both. In the author's view, there is no heroism at all in this war, only people who act like human beings and people who do not. This novel, as the translators have assembled it, may represent an old-fashioned way of telling stories, but its sense of the futility of war and its nuanced view of opposing ideologies--the refusal to issue blanket condemnation or praise--is distinctly modern.