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Shin Kyung-sook, author of the international bestseller Please Look After Mom, has been awarded the Royal Salute "Mark of Respect" award. Hat tip to the Subject Object Verb blog for running the story and providing this translation of the press release.
“Every year, Pernod Ricard Korea selects someone who has made a great achievement in the field of arts and culture and awards them the 'Mark of Respect.' Shin is pictured above with Peter Prentice (VP of Chivas Bros Asia-Pacific) and Jean-Manuel Spriet (CEO of Pernod Ricard Korea). Shin plans to donate the 50,000,000 (5천만원) KRW award to UNICEF and the Purme Foundation.”
Running the S. Korean won through a currency converter, you get $50,000 US. The Purme Foundation supports rehabilitation services in S. Korea, and for the teetotalers, Royal Salute is a Scotch whisky produced by Chivas Brothers. Congratulations, Shin Kyung-sook!
A short story by Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007) opens up a future of good reading, if "Woman in a Lampshade" typifies her work. This story marks the first time I’ve read Jolley, although she is a celebrated Australian fiction writer. This story makes you laugh, and then the main character’s shrill point of view becomes repellent and the story less funny, although it works on both levels at once. Laugh, and also recoil. Then the laughter stops.
The woman who wears a lampshade on her head calls herself a writer; she wears the lampshade while writing. "To wear the lampshade suggested the dangerous and exotic while still sheltered under a cozy domesticity." Well, all right then. We know quite a lot about this character already.
The story starts out mildly enough, with Jasmine setting off to her weekend retreat, a farmhouse she and her husband own. Driving in a heavy rainstorm, she picks up a young man who is getting soaked standing by the road. She takes him with her to the farmhouse, where he tries to sleep and she tries to write.
She struggles with a character she is developing, and before long the writer's fictional character and the young man blur surrealistically into a single figure. The reader experiences an off-kilter tone set by having both fictional characters within the story and also a character under construction in a story by one of those characters. The writer character's character acts a lot like the young man in the room. Is Jasmine imagining the whole episode, lampshade and all?
The story offers a glimpse of the writing process, a self-parodying one. Jolley looks at a possible process of the writing craft, when the author-character has no special talent for the undertaking. Jolley may only be parodying the stupidity of a pretend writer, but you have to consider whether the jaundiced view of the writer in particular has some application to writers in general or to the impossible positions writers can place themselves in, when they needlessly manufacture false creative problems. The fictional writer is focused, self-centered, and negligent of the only other person on the scene. She might solve her plotting problem, if she would only pay some attention to the words and feelings of the young man. Her inability to converse or empathize or observe spells doom for her project. Unease and absurdity undercut the hilarity of the story. A great read.
Jolley was born in England in 1923 and emigrated to Australia in 1959. She published her first book of short stories in 1976. This summary of writing honors is from her obituary at the website of Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, where Jolley had taught creative writing.
"During her distinguished career, she won many overseas literary awards and every major Australian prize, including the 1983 Age Book of the Year Award and the 1983 Western Australian Premier's Literary Award for Mr Scobie's Riddle, the 1984 New South Wales Premier's Award for Fiction for Milk and Honey, the 1986 Miles Franklin Award for The Well, the 1993 Western Australian Premier's Literary Award for Central Mischief, the 1994 National Book Council Banjo Fiction Award as well as the Age Book Prize for The Georges' Wife, and the 1999 Age Book of the Year Award for My Father's Moon. A recent collection of her essays was edited by Caroline Lurie, Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley - Her Life and Work (Viking/Penguin, 2006)."
"Woman in a Lampshade" 1979, published in Westerly 25, no. 2, 1980.
Title story in a 1979 collection. Penguin Books, Australia.
I read it in Relations: Australian Short Stories, Carmel Bird, ed. Houghton Mifflin Australia, 1991.
Notes on Waverly Root's 1958 travelog, The Food of France, were regular features of this blog last fall but came to an abrupt halt during the busy holiday season. Another obstacle was the chapter on "The Mountains" that run north to south along the eastern border of France. Root describes this area in painstaking detail, even though he generally does not hold the regional cuisine in high esteem. Writing about this chapter would have required more time than I was willing to give to the project in December, and I never returned to the book until now.
My method had been to write a blog post on the completion of each chapter, focusing sometimes on famous recipes, sometimes on art and history, or on traditional folkways, an archaic cookbook, architecture, wines or local delicacies. As long as the slow journey through France--with the accent on food--was a rewarding, relaxed read, I enjoyed writing a post about each region. When it became a chore, I gave it a rest.
Here's a note for new readers. I believe most of my posts on The Food of France are tagged "Waverly Root" and can be found by searching the blog on the sidebar. Root first came to my attention in the book As Always Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto; Food, Friends & the Making of a Masterpiece. One of them--memory fades--spoke admiringly of his food writing. The cover of the paperback I am reading quotes Craig Claiborne's glowing review of the book: "the most lucid and definitive book ever written in English on a cuisine that has flourished for centuries." Up until now, I had agreed with these famous gourmets about the book, but while reading this chapter some doubts arose over Root's tendency to generalize about the people in whatever region he was visiting, based on their environment and cooking.
In the chapter on "The Mountains," he explores Jura, Franche-Comté, Savoy, and Dauphiné. Root writes, "Certain characteristics are shared by most mountain cuisines, which might be summed up as essentially rude." Rustic, rude, unsubtle, monotonous. When the Great Gastronome uses this language, you suspect you are in for scorn and dismissal of not only the food but the people who prepare and eat it. Root attempts some occasional diplomacy toward the people of the region, but overall you get the idea that he sees geography as destiny. Who would doubt that people are formed by their origins and the way of life in their communities? But Root has a way of describing personality and character in a sweeping gesture of interpretation that reflects surroundings and diet. I think he goes too far, like a phrenologist reading bumps on the head or a palm reader tracing the lines. In this passage, he is describing the people of the Jura.
The rigors of the weather, the hardiness developed in a region in which almost everyone is a lumberjack and where a living has to be wrested from a reluctant soil, no doubt accounts in part for the toughness of the local character. Mountain peoples are usually fierce defenders of their independence, perhaps because their terrain makes defense feasible even against armies greatly superior in numbers, but the people of this region have a particularly proud reputation for resistance--sometimes described by exasperated outsiders as obstinacy.
Is this truthful observation or prejudice masked as ambiguous praise? If French people outside the mountains call the locals "pig-headed" or "hot-headed," is Root actually recording his own interactions with the people or repeating gossip? How reliable is this part of his story? I will continue to read Root but have begun to question his insight into the souls of the locals wherever he goes. The best quality of Root's travelog is that he does not stick to the food. His curiosity takes him along all kinds of divergent paths, and he writes about his findings with vim and wit. I do sometimes wonder, though, if Root may be over-simplifying the character of the people in each region, because it makes a neat, pretty and poetic scene to populate the area with people who act on the basis of topographical features and the style of food they cook. His views on local character may be exaggerated images determined by his fascination with food. Maybe you are what you eat, but you are not only what you eat, I'm thinking.
So the old Waverly Root charm was a bit less captivating in this chapter about the mountains and the mountain folk, but it is a wonderful book. I look forward to finishing it and will have a few more comments about this chapter later on. As usual, he tells some good stories about what he sees and hears and tastes.
Some historical fiction sets out to provide fluffy entertainment, but other novels, including Amitav Ghosh's books about the 19th C. opium trade, place a greater emphasis on accurate history. Like the best historical novelists, both escapist and literary, Ghosh serves up a feast of material culture along with the social and political history.
In River of Smoke, the second novel of his Ibis Trilogy, the action moves to 1838 China, site of the profitable opium trade. The first novel in the series, Sea of Poppies, began in the poppy growing region of India and moved onboard a ship en route to Mauritius, carrying workers, a couple of prisoners, and a young woman masquerading as a man. Although readers of the first novel will benefit from knowing the back stories of Neel and Paulette when they appear as minor characters in River of Smoke, the sequel stands alone. The principal character, Seth Bahram, is an Indian opium merchant who did not appear in Sea of Poppies, although he is closely connected to one of the minor characters of that book.
Ghosh does not tarry long in linking a few of the characters in River of Smoke to the earlier novel. We move to a storm at sea that damages a cargo of opium traveling from Bombay (now Mumbai) to Canton (now Guangzhou). Bahram, the merchant who suffers losses to his cargo, is an exporter turned opium merchant, one of the few major Indian opium traders in a business dominated by the British, Americans, Dutch, Danish and French. Water continues to form the setting for much of the novel, from the ocean to the Pearl River at Canton, to a lake, streams, or waterways between islands off the Chinese mainland. From a ship, we glimpse Singapore as an unpromising frontier town. Transitions of place and plot often occur on water.
Aside from showing the ins and outs of the opium trade, Ghosh runs other threads through the novel such as the search for an exotic Chinese plant, known to an Englishman only through its representation in a painting. Readers of the first novel will remember Paulette's history as the daughter of a botanist. In River of Smoke she goes to work for an English nurseryman who wants to import Chinese plants to Europe and America. Through letters to Paulette from an artist friend (Robin Chinnery) living in the foreign enclave at Canton, we hear about art, plants, gardens, the layout the city, the local society of the inhabitants. Readers uninterested in social history may not enjoy these epistolary diversions as much as I did. (The omniscient narrator provides abundant description of social history as well. For example, the passage about the first 30 courses of an 88-course Chinese banquet commanded my rapt attention.) Robin's letters move the plot forward in reporting the goings-on in the foreigner's enclave at Canton, but he is also quite a character in his own right, and I enjoyed the contextual detail that comes through in his wandering, garulous letters.
By having Paulette in the background, Ghosh can include a female character in a setting where women are banned. No foreign women could enter Canton; the Chinese permitted only men in the foreign enclave, and the gates of Chinese Canton were securely closed against all foreigners, both male and female. Ghosh also involves women in his story through recounting men's memories of their wives and lovers. Like Robin's letters, side stories exploring the personal history of various characters spin off regularly from the main plot. It is a storytelling technique I've come to associate with Indian narratives. Several of the Indian novels longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize tend, like River of Smoke, to take interesting side trips away from the dominant trajectory of story, with a profusion of pattern eventually composing a gloriously varied whole. I can imagine a reader becoming impatient with the style, but Ghosh writes literary fiction with an ear to elaboration not efficiency, and I enjoyed the stories running within the stories or parallel to the main stories. At one point, memory carries Bahram and his old friend the watchmaker Zadig back to the time their ship stopped on St Helena and their meeting with the imprisoned Napoleon.
The action of the novel takes place in 1838-39, just before the outbreak of the first Opium War, and Ghosh goes inside the foreign Chamber of Commerce to explore the attitudes and practices of the big opium traders. He stages meetings and banquets. He shows the relationship between the foreign traders and their Chinese counterparts, the opium buyers and distributors. We see their reactions as the Emperor and his anti-opium Commissioner start cracking down on the trade. We hear their dismay and anger over what most of them see as a restraint on free trade, their disgust with a dissenter among them who opposes the opium trade, the pitfalls of defiant smuggling, and the organizational politics within the foreign community over maintaining control of the merchants' Committee. We sense the foreigners' foreboding as Chinese troops enter their compound, as well as the bellicose mood of some of the prominent traders. The framework of geopolitical business practices in the opium trade bear directly upon today's environment of globalization and the economic philosophy of some of today's largest international players. Ghosh's representation of economic imperialism tells a history analogous to the experience of many post-colonial societies. He also gives voice to the perpetrators of past economic oppression who sometimes sound like those who would conduct business in similar ways today. In that sense the book has an uncomfortably familiar feel. The Neanderthal-type attitudes of some of the opium merchants sound regrettably like campaign platitudes of reactionary politicians the world over.
Read River of Smoke for the artistry of its storytelling, the depth of historical research, vividness of context and character, and relevance to issues dominating today's world economy. It is a historical novel for readers who like the emphasis on history, that is, fictionalized history. Readers of historical fiction who expect light escape or a fantasy-like immersion in the faraway and long ago will not find what they are looking for here. Readers of literary fiction who are also interested in world history and contemporary geopolitics should find the book an engaging, as well as entertaining, read. River of Smoke has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize to be announced on March 15th. Click here for a page linking reviews of River of Smoke by several other members of the Man Asian Prize Shadow Jury: Lisa, Mark and Matt.
River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh.
First published: John Murray Publishers, Great Britain (2011).
I read the American edition: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2011).
522 pages.
When the Mystery Writers of America announced the 2012 Edgar Award nominees a few weeks ago, the book by Japanese writer Keigo Higashino looked the most promising of the lot. The Devotion of Suspect X departs from the style of my usual crime novel choices, and it proved an entertaining and worthwhile read.
For the past few years, my taste in mysteries has run to novelists who place an engaging detective in an inviting location: Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti in Venice or Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen in Shanghai. The main interest of those novels lies in character and ambiance. Neither the setting nor the detectives dominates Suspect X, making for a diverting change of approach.
Higashino’s detectives play relatively minor roles in the story. The central characters are some seemingly ordinary people who carry an act of self-defense beyond necessity to the point of serious crime. A working woman who has been unfortunate in marriage, Yasuko Hanaoko is remarkable only for her beauty, and the police identify her as a suspect. Ishigami, a neighbor who lives next door, was once regarded as a brilliant mathematician, but now he teaches high school and lives alone, an isolated and disappointed man. Ishigami offers to help his neighbor, but eventually she begins to wonder if he is assisting or stalking her.
By a strained but forgivable coincidence, the math teacher attended university with a friend of the chief detective, a physics professor known in jest by the Tokyo police force as "Detective Galileo," because he sometimes helps his friend crack difficult cases. Here we have a suggestion of Sherlock Holmes in the great brain who solves puzzles that stump the police. Dr. Yukawa has appeared in five of Higashino’s novels, and the character was the basis for a Japanese tv series in 2007.
When the scientist and the math teacher cross paths, Higashino introduces an element of empirical inquiry. These two characters have sharp minds trained to think along detailed, logical, theoretical lines. Extraordinary thought meets atypical psychology in unusual circumstances, with unpredictable results. Higashino gives the reader enough plot turns to keep the story moving. Unlike some American and British crime writers who think they must shriek at the reader and go to any lengths to inspire awe, Higashino’s surprises are set in a more quiet frame. The style may not suit every mystery reader’s taste, but I liked the book’s pacing, characters, plot moves, and overall design. A good, fast read. Highly recommended.
A film based on the book, Suspect X, was released in Japan in 2008.
Japanese publication, 2005.
English edition, Minotaur Books, 2011, New York.
298 pages.
In her internationally bestselling novel, Please Look After Mom (2008), Kyung-sook Shin writes the fictional biography of an illiterate South Korean peasant who lived half of her life in poverty but saw her children rise to affluence and success in a modernized, urban economy. Now Mom, elderly and suffering mental lapses, has gone missing at a Seoul subway station where she became separated from her husband. The novel explores the family relationships as it tracks the efforts of her family to find her. It also reveals aspects of Park-So-nyo's personal history that were unknown to her children and shows how little they understand her complex character.
No other novel in recent memory has generated such wrong-headed reviews in parts of the American mainstream press. Professional women who would probably be incapable of empathizing with a stay-at-home mom down the street were assigned to review a novel about an illiterate farmer on the other side of the world. Like many other readers who commented at the National Public Radio website, I was offended by the NPR review. Not only does the reviewer insult Koreans and Korean culture, she manages to sneer at American women readers as well.
If there's a literary genre in Korean that translates into 'manipulative sob sister melodrama,' Please Look After Mom is surely its reigning queen. I'm mystified as to why this guilt-laden morality tale has become such a sensation in Korea and why a literary house like Knopf would embrace it. (Although, as women are the biggest audience for literary fiction, Please Look After Mom must be anticipated to be a book club hit in this country.) But, why wallow in cross-cultural self-pity, ladies?
This reviewer was untouched by the human dignity of Park-So-nyo and by the vividly Korean identity she communicates. Just because the main character has a sometimes melodramatic point of view and attempts, unsuccessfully, to manipulate her children's behavior through guilt does not make the novel itself melodramatic or appreciative readers self-pitying. This narcissistic reviewer entirely missed the cautionary tale of a woman who devoted much of her life to her family and now faces old age ignored, emotionally abandoned, and disrespected by her adult children. At least two of the "children" in this story are past fifty and are infantile in their relation to their parent, as self-absorbed as any adolescents. They have misjudged their mother in many ways, or as the older son says late in the day, "Maybe it was only her children who thought of Mom's life as being filled with pain and sacrifice, because of our guilt. We might actually be diminishing her life as something useless." Undoubtedly her life was filled with pain and sacrifice, but the children learn another story, at least part of the story, as they conduct their search and reflect on her life.
Yes, their mother can be unreasonable in her expectations. The oldest daughter is a novelist and Mom is not well pleased that she flies around the world to promote her books. She wants her daughter to stay closer to home and is worried about the safety of air travel. On the other hand, she is also disappointed that her younger daughter, who trained as a pharmacist, decided to stay at home to raise her three children instead of putting her education to good use. Park-So-nyo is no Western-style feminist, but she has trouble understanding why any educated woman would give up her career to stay at home.
The portrait of motherhood is historical, not idealized, and represents the sacrifices older generations of mothers made to build South Korea into its current position of strength. It is astounding that anyone could view as "ideal" a pattern of motherhood that involves bringing up children on a subsistence income, without the emotional support of her husband, in a context of loneliness and backbreaking labor. Yet another writer flings that accusation at the book, that it holds up an outmoded "ideal" of motherhood under patriarchy. Nonsense. The figure of the self-sacrificing mother may be a throwback because the level of self-abnegation mandated by economic conditions of late 20th Century South Korea no longer pertain. The novel is a love letter to the women who built today's world, a homage to the nobodies who gave their all. To the reviewer who attacks not only the book but readers of the book, I say right back at you that I sincerely believe contempt for the poor informs much of the snarky commentary on the novel, that and a profound inability to identify with someone, especially a woman, unlike yourself.
One source of cultural insensitivity may be the distance in time of American urbanites from our rural past when most people lived on farms. My children would have to reach back five generations to find an ancestor who lived on a farm. Our country's urbanization began in the 19th C. and by the 1920s it was in full swing. By the '40s, our population was mostly living in cities. Although four million refugees from North Korea poured into the country at the end of the Korean War, the urbanization of South Korea occurred primarily in the 1970s, '80s and '90s. The author Kyung-sook Shin, born in 1963, is herself the daughter of farmers; she grew up in a rural village and did not migrate to the city until she was sixteen. When her parents could not afford to send her to high school, she joined her older brother in Seoul, where she eventually earned a degree in creative writing.
The experiences associated with moving from a rural to an urban environment, and lifting from poverty to affluence, from ignorance to education, from restraint to personal freedom, from military dictatorship to democracy (in 1987) reside in the living memory of many adult South Koreans. Please Look After Mom captures all of those threads in South Korean culture and frames it in a context of motherhood. No wonder it was a runaway bestseller in South Korea. One blog specializing in South Korean literature says it has sold 1,600,000 copies there.
The reader gains a fuller perspective on the character than does any one of her family members. Park-So-nyo's idea of freedom is to be so far beyond material want that you can devote your life to the service of mankind. When the character finds herself in a position of relative plenty, she does exactly that, only to be ridiculed as "saintly" by some reviewers. The overt comparison at the end of the book of the longsuffering mother with the Virgin Mary may strike some readers as a tiresome turn, but we should not be surprised that a religious story about a mother honored for her sacrifice should pique the curiosity and appeal to the imagination of the woman who gave so much of herself to her children. We see no evidence that Park-So-nyo has adopted Catholicism, only that she admires a religion that respects mothers, as her children apparently do not.
Some readers have called the novel genre fiction, a designation that puzzles me. Do they mean women's fiction? I see it as a splendid work of literary fiction, neatly crafted and lovingly told. The book is divided into sections that focus on the oldest daughter, the oldest son, the husband, and the mother herself. Then an epilogue focuses again on the oldest daughter's perspective. Narration alternates between second person, third person and first person, reflecting something of the nature of the relationships between characters. Setting moves from urban present to rural past and present and back again to the city. As a historical novel about a typical family confronting urbanization and cultural change, it is unsurpassed in my reading experience. As a biography of a nobody who turns out to be an Everywoman of a Korea that is fading into memory, Please Look After Mom presents a respectful portrait of Every Mom worldwide who guided her family from rural poverty to a vibrant urban present. Please Look After Mom, published in other English editions overseas as Please Look After Mother, has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. The winner will be announced March 15th.
Please Look After Mom (2008) by Kyung-sook Shin, Changbi Publishers, South Korea.
I read the American edition: Borzoi Books, Alfred A. Knopf (2011). Ninth printing.
237 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-307-59391-7
Translation rights: USA, UK, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Japan, Vietnam, Germany, China, Taiwan, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Norway, Arabic (Which country? Egypt?). Publication now set for 23 countries, says the dust jacket.
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