Dành cho nỗi nhớ

by Park Wan-Suh, Nguyễn Lệ Thu (Translator)

“Thời đại đã thay đổi. Số người già tăng đột biến và không thể coi nhẹ trình độ cũng như tiềm năng kinh tế của đối tượng này. Việc tầng lớp thanh niên và trung niên quan tâm đến cuốn sách văn học đề cập đến giai đoạn lão niên này là điều hết sức hiển nhiên. Cuốn sách đã khơi gợi những xúc cảm đẹp đẽ, đầy nhân văn và thôi thúc niềm đam mê về văn hóa...” (Báo Kinh tế Seoul)

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Asia, Asian Literature, Literature

344 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 1998

About the author

See 박완서

Park Wan Suh (also Park Wan-seo, Park Wan-so, Park Wansuh, Park Kee-pah and Pak Wan-so, Pak Wanso) was born in 1931 in Gaepung-gun in what is now Hwanghaebuk-do in North Korea.Park entered Seoul National University, the most prestigious in Korea, but dropped out almost immediately after attending classes due to the outbreak of the Korean War and the death of her brother. During the war, Park was separated from her mother and elder brother by the North Korea army, which moved them to North Korea. She lived in the village of Achui, in Guri, outside Seoul until her death. Park died on the morning of January 22, 2011, suffering from cancer.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection from the iconic Korean writer Park Wan-Suh who managed to become both popular and critically admired, even though she didn’t begin to publish until she was in her forties. These stories provide a window into aspects of the lives of women in South Korea, and date from the late 1990s. Park examines issues faced by, mostly older, women: coming to terms with invisibility and aging, the dilemmas of dealing with increasingly frail parents, the complexities of negotiating the stated and unstated expectations of a rapidly-changing South Korean society. Her writing has a quality of unflinching realism while somehow retaining an admirable grace and subtlety, her work is deeply thoughtful and incisive with an acute sense of the intricate interplay of familial relations, social and cultural conventions and their impact on individuals. But these are not flashy pieces they’re quiet, yet unexpectedly complex, demanding attentive reading to fully appreciate Park’s insights and perspectives. I was particularly impressed by “Withered Flower” which explores the chasm between romantic fantasy and reality when an older women tentatively embarks on a new relationship with a man she meets by chance and “Psychedelic Butterfly” centred on a middle-aged daughter agonising over how to care for her increasingly senile mother. The translation by Elizabeth Haejin Yoon is convincing and fluid.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lonesome You was a very enjoyable read. This collection of stories follows characters dealing with disrespect--perceived or real. Irreverence pops up around ever corner: from in-laws, from fathers, from exes, from colleagues. These characters constantly struggle with a sense of resentment and anger toward their treatment. At times they are able to get a sense of revenge, other times they let go and move on, and sometimes they are trapped in their anger, unable to escape. Park uses a subtle and wry--sometimes mildly shocking--sense of humor throughout that makes the stories consistently entertaining. Her characters' thoughts and emotions all feel genuine and honest. A great rendering of many kinds of struggles in middle age and beyond.

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

너무도 쓸쓸한 당신 is a collection of short stories by South Korean writer Park Wan-suh, published in 1998. A heartfelt thanks to publisher Dalkey Archive Press and translator Elizabeth Haejin Yoon for bringing us this English translation Lonesome You (2013), two years after Madam Park's passing. Her first work was published when she was 40 and over the span of her works accrued numerous accolades and Korean literary awards like the Yi Sang Literary Prize and Order of Cultural Merit conferred by the President.

This is my first exposure to Madam Park's works and I was bowled over. I could analyze each story to bits but here's a few that stuck in my mind:

Withered Flower Reading a sample of this first story convinced me to buy the book. A fifty-nine-year old lady is returning from attending a disappointing out-of-town wedding of her nephew. It's disappointing because her nephew did not include the traditional pyebaek ceremony in his wedding program despite her wearing a traditional hanbok in preparation and did not arrange for her to stay the night. The unspoken expectations of an elder family toward a junior family member are interesting and will surface in other forms in the other stories. On the bus home, she meets a charming dapper gentleman of similar age and they deepen their acquaintance once back in Seoul. Their adult children discover their friendship and strongly encourage them to get together. Withered Flower is a story about aging and has a very clear-eyed distinctive protagonist voice:

Without those blinders on, I could see so clearly what the future held for us, so clearly the deterioration into old age from which no one is exempt, not even a stylish gentleman like him. Sagging flesh and shedding, dry skin flakes exposed when changing into long underwear; deafening snores that could move high mountains; cigarette ashes flicked everywhere; thick phlegm forced up by a protracted, guttural cough; a stream of farts released from raised buttocks; burps reeking of gastric acid; a gluttonous, selfish appetite; incessant nagging based on groundless suspicion and forgetfulness; and stinginess as if saving up for another lifetime—all these visions were crystal clear. Tolerating these sordid idiosyncrasies in each other required more than love. It required sharing many savage years together,...

As I read the short stories all in one go (truthfully not able to stop), certain themes and motifs emerge. The surprise at physical changes of aging, for instance: Then I froze in mid-action. Who was that hideous old woman? I almost screamed out loud at the reflection in the mirror in Withered Flower is repeated in the titular Lonesome You her husband walked out of the bathroom, she almost yelped in surprise before turning her eyes away. The lower half of his body, clad only in underwear, was hideous to see. The little remaining flesh on his thighs sagged like sacks of water, and scrawny calves with sparse hair stuck out below red, knobby knees. Madam Park treats her characters with utmost compassion and empathy; the struggles and inner voices of her elderly and middle-aged female characters within the obligations of family and their environs are depicted so well.

Psychedelic Butterfly On the surface, this is about a 39 yo disillusioned academic Young Joo whose elderly mother with dementia symptoms has gone missing. None of Madam Park's elderly characters are unwanted or uncared for; on the contrary, they all have filial children and family willing to take care of them. This story exposes the Korean cultural belief/preference that it is 'natural' to stay at an adult son's family and somehow shameful to stay with the adult daughter's.

Young Joo’s pride and Young Tak’s stubbornness seemed polarized, but in actuality, they were one and the same thing. What they wanted to uphold was not Mother, but the notion that it would be a disgrace to entrust an aging parent with a daughter when there was a son present.

The issue of staying with a son or a daughter was immaterial to her. When she was here, she wanted to be there and when she was there, she wanted to be here. And neither here nor there was Gwacheon. Her mental acuity appeared to be slipping, but perhaps it was actually getting sharper. Instead of going back and forth between her children’s homes like an unclaimed package, she was demanding to be sent to Gwacheon, a no man’s land that was neither here nor there. Before long, Mother began running away from Young Tak’s home.

Mother finds her place in a very interesting ethereal Buddhist temple and makes the title of the story especially poignant. This is also the story where Heo Nanseolheon, a Joseon Dynasty poetess, is brought up as the focus of Young Joo's research and resurfaces again in the subsequent story An Unbearable Secret.

Long Boring Movie An adult daughter is a caregiver to her ailing elderly mother with cancer, lamenting about the indignity of illness and callous treatment by her father. She reflects on her mother's lifetime of forbearance:

They say that you are solely responsible for your face after age forty. Even if I could turn into Queen Yang, I could never live like Mother. Hers was a life of absolute restraint, and she did not allow a single wisp of anger or pain to escape.

It was only when I was about to get married myself that I got clued into the determination, or even desperation, that Mother’s pride was made of.

She recalls her mother's advice before her upcoming nuptials:
"....Beware if your new husband tells you on your wedding night that you must honor his parents or that women come and go but parents are for keeps. If he says that kind of nonsense, you can leave him right then and there. Really, I won’t blame you if you do. Don’t think that he’s the only one loved and nurtured by his parents. You, too, are loved just the same.”
I must be the only daughter in this country who received this kind of pre-wedding pep talk.

The translator's somewhat clumsy attempts to render Korean rural dialect/accent into twangy English is especially noticeable here, also in Lonesome You .

The tie-in to the title is a stab to the heart.

That Girl’s House About a young villager couple Jan Man-deuk and Gop-dan in the 1940s broken up by the Korean War and the repercussions years later.

Man-deuk: In honoring the sacrifices of the comfort women, I wanted to include those who have evaded conscription but suffered in other ways. Those who experienced it directly and those who were affected indirectly were all victims of imperialism. What price did some women pay to be exempt from such a fate? If someone jumps off a ten-story building to avoid an armed burglar, does that absolve the burglar of his crime? We can’t forget, it’s not humanly possible to forget, the atrocities against man and God that wiped out love and laughter from all corners of our land.

[As a small aside, I wonder if there's a deliberate connection between the stories of a bog dragon?
If Man-deuk was a dragon born from a swamp, then Gop-dan was a lotus blossoming in a bog.

And from Withered Flower: When I was dating my husband, my mother thought highly of him as a person, for she referred to him as ‘a dragon from a bog.’ But when I wanted to marry that dragon she opposed it adamantly. She said that marrying a dragon from a bog was not rescuing the dragon but throwing one’s self into the bog. But no matter how much she cried over me, I could only see the dragon and not the bog.
What other people saw as a bog became the fountain of my life, my raison d’etre. ]

I'll stop before this develops into a whole treatise. Even in stories like Thorn Inside Petals where I was still left with questions, the stories seed and unfurl leaving a lingering memory.

[John Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Park Wan-suh (1931-2011) published her first work when she was almost 40, after living for years a conventional Korean woman’s life as a full-time wife and mother and raising four children. She was born in Kaepung in what is now North Hwanghae Province in North Korea, about 50 miles northwest of Seoul. She was admitted to Seoul National University when she was 19 but had to drop out soon after entering due to the outbreak of the Korean War. She stayed in Seoul through the war as it suffered the constant upheavals of invasion and re-invasion, lost an uncle and a brother in the violence, and was herself subjected to humiliating interrogation by South Korean authorities on suspicion of being a “red”. In her early work (most notably her first novel, The naked Tree, 1970, and Mother’s Stake [or Hitching Post], 1980) she focused on the war and the damage it caused to people’s lives. In her later work (including the present book) she turns her attention to post-recovery Korea of twenty and more years later in which the old Confucian values of hierarchy and duty and respect for elders have degenerated into greed and hypocrisy and evasion of responsibility.

This Lonesome You is a translation of a collection of ten short stories originally publish in Korean in 1998. Some have already been appeared in different translations with different titles (including the first two); others to the best of my knowledge are appearing in English for the first time.

Withered Flower – a widow in a grumpy mood after being shabbily treated at her nephew’s wedding meets an attractive older man on the train who turns out to be a widower himself. They begin to date in a tentative way but their families (who are connected by school friendships) get involved and start working together to push the couple into marriage. Their motives are clearly mixed, part genuine caring, part selfish (“they will look out for each other so we won’t have to”). A decision has to be made.

Psychedelic Butterfly – an old woman who suffers from dementia and has a tendency to wander off lives with her daughter but decides it would be better to follow custom and live with her son. He is willing, but his wife is less than happy with the arrangement. They try it but it doesn’t work out and the daughter takes her mother back. But she wanders off again and this time cannot be found in any of the usual places. The daughter finally finds her but now she is in a different world. A very touching story, even vaguely spiritual, which is not characteristic of the author.

An Unbearable Secret – a woman wakes up early at a seaside guesthouse and goes for a walk on the beach. She encounters a group of people circled around what she can see is a body. She rushes to the site and pushes her way through the crowd to get to the body but realizes from what people are saying that what has happened is not what she feared. She leaves the scene, still highly agitated, and goes into the closest shop, which is a sushi place not yet quite open. She passes on an offer of coffee and orders a bottle of soju and begins drinking, something she clearly does with experience and relish. As we follow her memories back and forth through time we learn that she is 40 years old, has a husband and children back in Seoul, and believes she is cursed to destroy everyone she pays attention to. And as we reach the hand of the story we have to wonder how far things have gone.


Long Boring Movie – a woman proposes to her brother that they move their father from their parents’ house to someplace closer to make it easier for them to visit him and look after him. He responds by bringing up the sore subject of how she took care of their mother in her dying days, a duty that he and his wife should have taken on but couldn’t have due to the fact that she worked full time (a double shame for him). As the daughter looks back on those days we learn about her mother and her suffering, not only from cancer, but also from her unhappy marriage to her husband, who “looked at her as a cow looks at a chicken” and for years lived openly with a mistress. Though practically nothing is revealed about how the parents related to their children, it is still really the story, not merely of the father and mother, but of the whole family. In the end the question is, why is the daughter so drawn to what she herself describes as the long boring movie of caring for a parent as they succumb to old age, infirmity, and finally death?

Lonesome You – a woman gets together with her estranged husband for the college graduation of their son Chae Hoon as they has done several years ago for that of their daughter Chae Jung. The woman is responsible for the separation: she reached a point that she could no longer stand her unsophisticated loud-voiced school principal husband, and when her daughter was admitted to a university in Seoul she saw her chance to escape and moved to Seoul with her two children on the grounds of it being the best way to take care of them. When the couple reunited at their daughter’s graduation they ended up being pushed to the sideline by their future son-in-law’s family. The woman figured this was normal – of course they would want to fuss over their graduating son – and looked forward to the roles being reversed when their own son graduated. But that did not happen. They are even more effectively sidelined at her son’s graduation by his new wife’s family. The woman finally becomes so distressed that she leaves the event without saying goodbye to anyone, even their son, grabbing her husband and taking him with her. I won’t summarize what happens after that. I’ll just say that I think this is the best story in the collection, the most intimate, the most human, and ultimately, the most universal.

(A couple notes on the translation of this story. Chae Hoon’s new mother-in-law always refers to him as Jung Seobang, which looks like a proper name but actually means something like Master Jung, seobang being a term that in-laws sometimes use to refer to a son-in-law. Also, in the original Korean title the word for you is dangsin, which is mostly used between older married couples. The title can thus be thought of as being, at least in effect, My Lonesome Spouse.)

That Girl’s House – A writer describes how on reading the poem That Girl’s House by poet Kim Yong-taek (actually a real poem by a real poet) she was seized by the idea that the poem was actually by someone she knew long ago writing under a pseudonym and that the house was that of the girl he loved as a teenager. She tells the story of how he and the girl were seen by the whole village as the perfect couple who would certainly get married in time, but were separated when the Korean War broke out, she going to the North and he to the South, never to reunite. She also tells how she met him again many years later (though before reading the poem) and learned from him that the true heart of the story was not doomed young love but something much bigger.

Thorn inside Petals – A woman learns that her elder sister has died. The sister, who she last saw just a month before, had emigrated to America thirty years ago and had returned to Korea for the first time to attend the wedding of the oldest son of her one son who now lives in Korea. (Her other three children all live in the States.) The news triggers memories of her sister’s recent visit, which got off to a bad start when she got off the plane dressed in tacky, age-inappropriate clothes, and went precipitously downhill after she reluctantly revealed what was in her fancy Louis Vuitton suitcase. (They had expected gifts but it was something quite different.) The son’s wife was convinced that the other children were trying to foist their mother off on her and her husband and, after much squabbling, the sister returned to America. And now, a month later, she is dead. The woman meets the son after he returns from the funeral and, as he talks, thinks back on what she had learned of her sister’s life during the visits she was able to make with plane tickets generously sent by her sister. This includes a job that her sister once had that is connected in a strange way to the contents of the suitcase.

A Ball-playing Woman – the family of a rich tycoon has made sure that his daughter by a long-time mistress, now dead, has been excluded from the will, but after he dies they discover that he has managed to send something her way. The family does their best to keep everything they consider to be theirs, but to do so they need to negotiate with the girl.

J-1 Visa – A high school teacher is invited by one of his former star students who’s now teaching in a university in the US to participate in a conference she has organized and talk about a novel he wrote when he was young. He’s all set to go when he hits a snag getting his J-1 (cultural exchange) visa from the US Embassy. He has a still active tourist visa – he has family in the US and has visited them several times – but he needs the J-1 to qualify for the $500 honorarium the university has offered him. Time is running out and he will have to make a decision.

An Anecdote: The Bane of my Existence – A writer, ostensibly the author, has problems with her computer and engages a technician to help her. At first he can’t believe she would be using a computer at all, but when she persists he concludes that she must be a professional typist.

There are a lot of similarities in the stories. All are in one way about the decline of middle class values mentioned above. All are told from a woman’s point of view. (J-1 Visa seems to be an exception. It is nominally objective, but you can’t help but feel you are seeing through the eyes of the man’s wife.) In almost every case the woman is over forty years old and sometimes much older. (The one exception here is A Ball-playing Woman, in which the woman is about thirty.) And, one way or another, almost all are about getting old in a society where it is becoming harder and harder to do so with dignity.

You may find the stories a bit hard to follow. They are actually surprisingly consistent in their structure: they begin at a moment in the present, go back in time, and then return to the present again to wrap up. Keep that in mind, and register the information given at the beginnings about the protagonists’ families (who’s in them and how they are referred to by the protagonist, i.e. name for younger family members, family roles for older ones, including brothers and sisters), and you should be fine. Oh yes and one other thing. Try to learn something about Heo Nanseolheon, the 16th century Korean female poet. She comes up in several of the stories and has, I sense, special significance for the author.

A great book! Five stars.

[Didem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I borrowed this book from the city library. Three stories in, I realized I need to have a copy of my own. I even tried to pace myself, so I would not finish the book in one day and savor it as long as possible.

Park Wan-Suh, - in my opinion- has an extraordinary intelligence and literary creativity to evoke so many different emotions in a 15-20 pages story.
"Lonesome You" reminded me of Nancy Lindisfarne's "Dancing in Damascus." The stories would fit into an anthropological study of customs and norms in Korean society - but they are written as short stories, which perhaps enabled Park to "tell truths an academic monograph could not contain." The stories explore subjects such as marriage, patriarchy, elderly care, death, authoritarianism, and colonialism.

So powerful and insightful. These stories definitely left their marks on me.

One of my favorite stories was "That Girl's House," for example. Through the story, you get a glimpse of rural life in Korea's pre-colonial period and then the devastating effects of colonialism - how it ripped the communities and way of living. The story touches on the issue of "comfort women" - not only considering the women who were forced into sexual slavery but other rippled effects for the women who had to live in fear of such atrocity. "...In honoring the sacrifices of the comfort women, I wanted to include those who have evaded conscription but suffered in other ways. Those who experienced it directly and those who were affected indirectly were all victims of imperialism. What price did some women pay to be exempt from such a fate?" (from That Girl's House).

[Jessica Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Park Wan-Suh paints wonderful pictures with concise use of language and her knowledge of her characters and their world is second to none. She describes the emotion felt by all her characters as if she were them, and she certainly knows a lot of these strong characters personally.

Her protagonists being largely female with Asian expectations burdening them is something I identified with throughout and maybe this influenced my view on this book, however my reason for favouring this book is due to the focus on the societal pressures rather than historical in the collection of stories.

The medium length stories feel like novellas in themselves so it is easy to read one and then put the book down for several days to a week. That is certainly what I did, and it has been a pleasant read whilst times have been busy.

This has been well translated and is an easy read (however my judgement cannot be made easily as I have not read the Korean version nor could I claim to be proficient enough to translate it). Elizabeth Haejin Yoon is skilled and has understanding of the historical and cultural context so that these do not get 'lost in translation'

[Agnes Murr · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best collection of stories I have read recently.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of these stories were heart rending or somber but enjoyable in the sense that they that brought a new perspective and feeling of depth to my culture - beyond what so many people know Korea for (skin care, Kpop, Korean dramas and now Korean reality). I was glad to read this while travelling in our home country. I would like to reread this, as it seems that the stories are meant to be connected because there were recurring names, but I hadn’t spent the time to carefully know who these recurring characters were.

[hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finely written (and translated). Saya fikir apa yang suratkhabar Hankook Ilbo komen tentang buku ini, quoting it-- "they are also about the flavor of living", adalah sangat tepat.

Heart breaking (in a way), buat saya fikir apa kena entah dengan kehidupan walaupun ada keluarga dan orang-orang yang kita sayang, but still that lonely feeling still linger macam parasit. Buku yang bercerita tentang jiwa-jiwa yang sunyi (most of the main character in each stories at an age of 40+) dan masih cuba bertahan.

Saya suka hampir kesemua cerita. Satu buku dengan kisah-kisah kehidupan yang bagus-- walaupun sedikit bitter with not that happy ending, but still, a good read.

"When fantasies come true as in a dream, the reality bares no difference from the dream itself."

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Park Wan-Suh, who died in 2011, was one of the best known women writers in Korea; this is a collection of ten of her short stories, which I read for the World Literature group on Goodreads. To be honest they were all rather depressing; they nearly all concerned people, mostly older women, who had deprived themselves of any happiness in life largely through their own pride or stubbornness, although social conditions played a role in some of them. The stories were good in terms of characterization and structure, although I wasn't impressed by the actual writing -- which of course may be the fault of the translation. I don't know whether the author or the translator is responsible for the "deep navy . . . aquamarine", which put me off from the third sentence of the book.

[Ocean G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of the stories deal with in-laws, parents in-law, relatives in the United States, and the like. Some of the stories were excellent. Withered flower, Psychedelic butterfly, An unbearable secret (the first three) were my favorites.

The Stories:
Withered Flower
Psychedelic Butterfly
An Unbearable Secret
Long Boring Movie
Lonesome You
That Girl's House
Thorn Inside Petals
A Ball-Playing Woman
J-1 Visa
An Anecdote: The Bane of My Existence

[Kat Dixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

More tell than show, but god is it a relief to read women written by a woman.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

Park Wan-suh's Lonesome You (translated by Elizabeth Haejin Yoon, review copy courtesy of the publisher) contains nine longish stories focusing primarily on issues the elderly face in modern-day Korea. From love in life's twilight years to dealing with the in-laws, Park examines the way changing traditions have left the older generations adrift, at the mercy of relatives who no longer feel quite as much veneration for the elderly as was previously the case.

Several of the stories look at the realities of striking up new relationships at an advanced age. The opening story, 'Withered Flower', sees a widow meet a handsome widower on a coach journey back to Seoul, gradually developing a close friendship with him. However, there are a couple of obstacles in the way. One is the determination of overbearing family members to push the two into marriage; the other is slightly more personal:

"I strutted out of the bathroom into the adjoining bedroom naked - moments like this undoubtedly being one of the perks of living alone . I threw a small towel under my feet to catch the water dripping from my body and reached for the phone. Then I froze in mid-action. Who was that hideous old woman? I almost screamed out loud at the reflection in the mirror."
'Withered Flower', p.26 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013)

It's an unwelcome reality check for a woman who prides herself on her appearance...

The title story, 'Lonesome You', takes a slightly different look at the topic as it explores the life of a couple who have virtually separated. Meeting at their son's graduation, the two escape from the son's girlfriend's interfering parents, ending up alone together for the first time in a while. Initially the wife is repelled by the man she is tied to by law, but she gradually starts to realise why he has turned out as he has and the extent of his sacrifices for the family. While his actions may have angered her at times, she comes to realise that he was always thinking of what was best for his wife and their children.

Unlike the protagonists of these stories though, some of the elderly characters are dependent on their families, and the responsibility of caring for parents is a common theme running through the collection. In 'Psychedelic Butterfly', an old woman frequently shuttled between her children's houses runs away, and the children feel guilty about their inability to decide what to do:

"This world was too, too small, and allowed all kinds of associations. One could always find a link, however remote, among relatives, school friends, and hometown acquaintances. Even a bottom feeder and a top dog were connected in some way, if one searched hard enough."

'An Unbearable Secret' (p.97)

It's this societal pressure which makes things so difficult. Everyone expects the eldest son to take on the responsibility of caring for a widowed mother, and when this doesn't happen, people start to talk...

This guilt is also prominent in 'Long Boring Movie', a story in which a woman recalls her mother's last days while planning her father's move to an apartment close to hers. In this story, her brother is constantly making biting remarks, tacitly accusing his sister of having an eye on his inheritance - despite the fact that he has no intention of looking after his father himself. This eldest son's pressure is actually mirrored in the father's behaviour as the daughter starts to think that his wandering eye may have stemmed from the pressure he felt as the head of the family.

A slightly different theme which appears in Lonesome You is the connection between Korea and the United States, with several of the stories featuring tales of emigrants in, or coming back from, America. 'Thorn inside Petals', a story of two elderly sisters, first looks at the bizarre behaviour of an elderly ex-pat before showing us how she made her way in the US. This sombre tale is nicely balanced by 'J-1 Visa', the light-hearted story of a Korean writer desperately trying to get a visa to attend a seminar in the US, one which turns into an amusing rant about colonialism...

There's a lot to interest the reader here, particularly in its view of a male-dominated, patriarchal society, but Lonesome You is certainly not my favourite of the series so far. For one thing, the stories tend to be overly long, unfocused and rambling. The nine stories are spread over 250 pages, and to be honest, you get the feeling that they would have been much better if they'd only run to 150. There were a couple of times when I was simply skim-reading to get back into the flow of the story, not something I usually do.

I'd also say that I wasn't overly convinced by the writing, whether that's the fault of the original or the translation. There were too many odd vocabulary choices, and at times it all felt rather stilted. As a whole, it didn't really flow, and there were a couple of stories (including 'A Ball-playing Woman') which I just didn't rate at all...

An interesting comparison to make here is with the undisputed Korean hit-in-translation of recent years, Shin Kyung-sook's Please Look After Mother. Lonesome You explores many of the same themes, and if you liked Shin's book, you may well enjoy this. Of course, as my regular readers will know, I hated it with a passion, so it's unsurprising that I didn't enjoy Lonesome You as much as some others might;)

Park may be a big name back in Korea, but I'm afraid her work isn't really to my taste. There's a lot more K-Lit coming this way over the next few months, but I think I'll continue my K-Lit odyssey with someone else's books...

*****
This review originally appeared on my blog, Tony's Reading List

[Gem · Rating 5 out of 5]

너무도 쓸쓸한 당신 by 박완서 is one of the only few collections of short stories that I found myself enjoying every single story. Each short story discusses how different people deal with loneliness and how, as human beings, we are all suffering alone in many aspects of life.

Loneliness to each individual presents itself in a different light. Just like happiness, sorrow adds colors to our lives.

Sometimes, our own innermost sorrows and insecurities stemming from the past prevent us from accepting our happiness in the present and seeking peace in the future. In a way, we are the creators of our own sufferings.

We all have our own ways of dealing with life matters and living our lives. Each one of us is a chess piece in this convoluted matrix known as society, trying to find our way out safely knowing that all actions lead to different consequences.

(27/12/2023)

[Silvia Korchumova · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book of Korean literature I have read and I'm grateful for the chance to have a glimpse of the country's literature and contemporary Korean society. The book is very insightful in this sense, the stories are a personable mix of contemporary life and history and traditions. The writing is great, narrating the stories from the point of view of the protagonists in each story. The characters are very self-absorbed and quite neurotic, which leads to somewhat dry and bleak narratives, almost entirely lacking description of the "outside" world, e.g., the physical world outside the troubled minds of the protagonists.

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

These short stories can be a complicated read. I breezily read along until something in the text said, 'Wait a minute. What's this?' Going back to the beginning passages, I found the answer that changed my perspective about the story. Those scattered bits combined when put together finally led in the right direction. All the content had something to recommend, though, after a few days the memory fades about the details. Maybe 'That Girl's House,' 'Thorn Inside Petals,' and 'A Ball-playing Woman' were the most satisfying.

[Leany Girolamo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The theme and the literary style are all finalised in the way I expected!

[Paul Ransom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stand-out here is the nature of the voice. The late Park Wan-Suh's 1998 anthology not only distills generational and ethnic worldviews into ten pointed vignettes but allows us to experience something nigh visceral about the experience of aging in a society undergoing rapid change. Her characters seem poised between worlds both lost and emerging, stranded between tradition and modernity. Although the short stories in this collection are intimate - small scale dramas occurring against the sprawling canvas of Korean society in the last years of the 20th century - Park's voice is sharp and idiosyncratic. At times almost cruel. Yet, for every moment when she seems harsh and unyielding, there are others when we are granted a moment in the shoes of those swimming against the tides of cultural/gender expectation, economy, and time. 'Lonesome You' is sometimes unsettling, sometimes cold, but even the practised chill of a disciplined storyteller does not obscure the humanity within.

[akemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

eu queria muito poder ler esse livro “CRU” e entender as expressões em sua língua materna, a maneira como os sotaques são descritos, todos esses detalhes que acabam não tendo o mesmo impacto ao serem traduzidos para o inglês. mas eu gostei demais! nos aproxima de muitas experiências pessoais e coletivas de mulheres coreanas, muuuuuuito importante! e que escrita!!!!!!!
ele com certeza merece 5 estrelas mas algumas coisinhas me deixaram em análise

[Miyu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Câu cú ng dịch chán lắm nhưng nd thì hay, nv có chiều sâu, đáng đọc.

[Lukas Van Veen · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you adore your bride, you bow down even to the pole in front of her house .