More excuses! But you'll forgive me.

A round-up of books I've read very and not so recently and which I've concluded I'm not going to take the time to review individually. Why? Two things: 1) I start an awesome new job in approx. 10 days and want to spend as little time as possible before then on the cpu. 2) Spring is insinuating itself into the blasted deathscape that is Toronto in late winter; I can't help but go outside a lot, especially on days like today - when it's so warm out that my most favourite cuorduroy jacket is deployed sans hat, mitt, or scarf! Vitamin D absorption is nigh.

1) Anthony Trollope, The American Senator.
I really wanted to spend more time on Trollope's look at moral and cultural relativism through the lens of as, as usual, a damned fine story. Suffice to say, it's one of my Trollopian favourites and has helped to confirm him as one of my most beloved authors.

2) Hwang Sok-Yong, The Guest.
The guest, small pox, as a metaphor for American cultural imperialism in the Koreas. A very good book - both writing and plot-wise - in spite of (because of? That would be a first.) Hwang's unabashed didacticism. Also, Hwang is a real-life ass-kicker, which makes the Truth-Telling even more okay/awesome.

3) Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
My experience reading this book disturbingly reflected the arc of the novel's plot. I began it during an unmitigated shit-storm (bookstore-closing) and concluded it at a time of unrivalled happiness (added to, but not created by, new job mentioned above). Still, my life is not all even close to being as strange as Dickens's fiction. Dickens, you managed to surprise me with this one - unexpected, and I thank you.

That is all. I'm going outside into the sun again RIGHT NOW.

Since the beginning of time...

This here photograph is of kimchi jigae, one of my favourite Korean dishes. It looks delicious, doesn't it? Even so, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you're wondering what it's doing here, on a book blog.

The sad fact is, I couldn't find any photos of the book I just finished reading, The Waves by Kang Shin-jae, on the interwebs. I also couldn't find a larger than hyper-minuscule photo of the author and the Korean flag .jpg I tried to download crashed my computer so kimchi jigae it is for this post's pretty picture.

I lived in South Korea for a year and I'm ashamed to admit how little Korean lit I read in that time. I read one of the modern classics, Yi Munyol's Our Twisted Hero, but couldn't get past the terrible translating to decide whether or not I thought it was a good book. I also had a book of Korean short stories that I really enjoyed and which I made the mistake of lending to someone and therefore never saw again. (Damn you, you know who you are!)

When I happened upon Kang Shin-jae's The Waves I was really pleased and it's taken me only about 2 months to get to it - which constitutes lightning speed in my book queue. This novel covers a year in the life of Young-sil, a gossipy teenage harridan, in rural Korea; the narrative is linear but more episodic than sustained story-telling, which isn't a bad thing, although I do love me sustained story-telling.

Overall I enjoyed this book, but that's because some sections were really good; and yet, as a counterbalance to the good bits there were parts that were about as subtle as a 2x4 to the kneecap. This may be a translating problem or it may be that Kang's novel is just uneven. Who knows? I do know that passages like the following made me want to tear my hair and gnash my teeth:

Death is an unavoidable and universal phenomenon. No one can control, plan for, or compensate for it; it is an understood, expected event of life, yet, it is never fully welcomed or accepted. From the beginning it has been a mystery, and as long as humanity endures, the mystery of death will remain. (p. 96)

Dear lord, who wrote this? This is the kind of thing that, especially that final sentence, I had to continually remind my uni students not to begin their essays with, you know, the "Since the beginning of time..." opener. "Since the beginning of time, love has been confusing and difficult. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hamlet and Ophelia share a set of confusing and difficult emotions which only they understand, which leads to their downfall." No, that's not a real essay introduction - I wrote it myself and it made me sad because I've read too many things too similar to it.

Anyway, The Waves, besides being uneven was plagued with a bevy, a horde, an embarrassment of typos - which I find distracting beyond description. Verdict: this book was uneven, as symbolized by waves, as they crest and then crash, always going up in great power and then breaking apart in defeat. Damn you, Kang, and your too frequent explanations of your own elementary school symbolism!!

63. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

Finding South Korean literature translated into English and available in Canada is surprisingly difficult given how widely available translated Chinese and Japanese works are. I was thus surprised and pleased to find Young-Ha Kim's I Have the Right to Destroy Myself prominently displayed in Pages while I was browsing there one day a few months ago.

I hadn't even heard of Kim, in spite of my time in South Korea, so I promptly added this book to my now deleted wish list - and Deb sent this to me for Festivus.

I picked it up this morning after deciding to kick the Rao book to the curb, and even though I made Brook and I a lovely tofu scramble for brunch, we visited friends at a New Year's open house in the afternoon, and I made homemade soup for dinner, I still easily finished this one tonight - it was only 120 pages and an easy read.

I'm not sure if it was a pleasurable read, however. It was intriguing, yes. It didn't irritate me in any way. I certainly enjoyed it at points. Yet, I'm still not sure if I liked it. It's exceptionally post-modern, which may be part of my ambivalence. I like the basic premise of the book - the narrator's job is to convince people to kill themselves (for which they pay him); but he's also writing a novel, so it's not clear if he's really doing these things or if his art and his reality aren't clearly delineated. Indeed, the line between art and reality is often crossed in this book (in the lives the narrator affects) with terrible personal consequences. I guess it's the lack of clarity that's bugging me.

I guess it's not then the post-modernism per se that bugs me, but that some authors aren't as good as others at making both the connections and the vacuums meaningful, if that makes sense. I feel that Kim must have been influenced by Haruki Murakami but that he may have liked Murakami's later work too much (like Kafka on the Shore) which never fulfills its own promise instead of his earlier work (especially Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) which often does.

In the end, I'm glad I read it if only to get a sense of the kind of literature that wins young Korean authors awards these days. Being taken on a tour of the craziness of living in Seoul, if only briefly, wasn't bad either.