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Please Look After Mother by Kyung-Sook Shin
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Please Look After Mother (original 2008; edition 2012)

by Kyung-Sook Shin

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,51410211,863 (3.75)108
Follows the efforts of a family to find the mother who went missing from Seoul Station and their sobering realizations when they recall memories that suggest she may not have been happy.
Member:LadyMuck
Title:Please Look After Mother
Authors:Kyung-Sook Shin
Info:Phoenix (2012), Edition: Mass Market Paperback, Paperback, 288 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:***1/2
Tags:None

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Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin (2008)

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» See also 108 mentions

English (91)  Spanish (3)  French (2)  Finnish (1)  Dutch (1)  Catalan (1)  Swedish (1)  Norwegian (1)  All languages (101)
Showing 1-5 of 91 (next | show all)
A very highly regarded and very well-reviewed book that, in the end, left me pretty much unaffected. Mom goes missing and the rest of the book is about her children and her husband as they reflect on Mom even as they search for her. Nothing exceptional, to my mind, about the recollections and stories, happy moments, regrets, etc. Disappointing. ( )
  Gypsy_Boy | Aug 26, 2023 |
I did not understand this book AT ALL. ( )
  blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 |
Not my kind of novel. Sappy. I’m sure there were some things I didn’t understand that would have made me appreciate it more. A lot of it was narrated in the 2nd person “You went to the house, then you walked in the door.” Nothing wrong really that I guess, but it was sometimes confusing, and got a little tedious. I did like that it was set in Korea, I suppose if it had been the same basic novel but set in the US with Americans I would’ve quit reading it after a few chapters. Supposedly it was a massive hit in Korea… but then there are plenty of immensely popular books here that I have no interest in either. ( )
  steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |
Kyung-sook Shin is a prolific and extremely popular South Korean author. Please Look After Mom was her first novel to be translated into English, and was the first novel by a South Korean and a woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize. For these reasons, I was looking forward to reading the book, but I had a hard time getting into it. Fortunately I persevered, as I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

The novel opens with a family trying to create a missing persons flyer for their mother/wife. In the process they realize that none of them truly knew her. In the months that follow, memories surface, relationships are reflected upon, and a myriad of feelings emerge. Although the book is narrated in the second person, each chapter is told from the perspective of a different person: the daughters, the oldest son, and the father. There is even a chapter by the mother, and it is only at this point that we learn the woman's name. As each perspective is layered atop the previous ones, the character of the woman they called Mom is developed further.

My initial difficultly in connecting with the book stems in large part from the second person narration. At first I had trouble tracking who "you" was, and it sounded forced to my inner ear. But as I became more engaged, I ceased to notice it as much, and when I finished, I realized why the author chose to use this technique. By inundated the reader with "you", the distinction between reader and character is less clear, and it's impossible not to reflect on one's own family relationships.

The life of the woman at the center of the story is a difficult one. Poor, illiterate, and ignored, she nonetheless sacrifices to ensure that her children succeed in life. Although in her children's eyes, her absence and their guilt combine to beatify her, even going so far as to invoke images of the Pieta, Park So-nyo is a multi-faceted character with some interesting secrets and dimensions.

Please Look After Mom can be read as a universal story of mother-child relationships, or as a South Korean one, with particular emphasis on the tension between the responsibility to care for one's parents and the desire to live independently, and the importance of birth order and gender in sibling relationships. After reading a short biography of the author, I wonder if there are autobiographical elements as well. Like the oldest daughter in the book, Kyung-sook Shin was born into a large family in a rural village but moved as a teenager to Seoul to live with her elder brother and became a successful author. ( )
1 vote labfs39 | Sep 5, 2022 |
This was an amazing story of sacrifice and a mother's love. The chapters are each family member's memories of mom and their regrets of not appreciating her before she was lost. ( )
  christyco125 | Jul 4, 2022 |
Showing 1-5 of 91 (next | show all)
In an odd way this brilliant book reminds me of Natsume Sōseki's 夏目漱石 (1867–1916) novel Kokoro こころ (1914). Natsume laments how much the Japanese lost in their mad rush to modernize during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Ms. Shin asks the same questions of Koreans a century later.
added by sgump | editSoutheast Review of Asian Studies, Daniel A. Métraux (Dec 31, 2012)
 
Penitence is, after all, this book’s whole point. Characters’ eyes begin watering, pooling with tears, brimming over, etc., as each one has the chance to realize that Mom was a treasure. (Bonus sobbing cue: Nobody knew that Mom was secretly working at an orphanage in her spare time.) Mom’s children start to see how wrong it was to abandon ancestral traditions for their busy, newfangled, heartless, stressed-out city lives.
 
An enormous publishing success in South Korea, this simple portrait of a family shocked into acknowledging the strength and heroic self-sacrifice of the woman at its center is both universal and socially specific.
added by Shortride | editKirkus Reviews (Jan 1, 2011)
 

» Add other authors (11 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Kyung-sook Shinprimary authorall editionscalculated
Chi-Young KimTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
O love, so long as you can love. - Franz Liszt
Dedication
First words
It's been one week since Mom went missing.
Quotations
Since you heard about Mom's disappearance, you haven't been able to focus on a single thought, besieged by long-forgotten memories unexpectedly popping up. And the regret that always trailed each memory.
”Did you like being in the kitchen? Did you like to cook?” Mom's eyes held yours for a moment. “I don't like or dislike the kitchen. I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not.” Mom's expression asked, What kind of question is that? And then she murmured, “If you only do what you like, who's going to do what you don't like?”
The thing your wife said to you most frequently, ever since you met her when you were twenty, was to walk more slowly. How could you have not gone slower, when your wife asked you to slow down your entire lives? You'd stopped and waited for her, but you'd never walked next to her, conversing with her, as she wanted – not even once. Since your wife has gone missing, your heart feels as if it will explode every time you think about your fast gait.
If I can't live like Mom, how could she have wanted to live like that? Why did this thought never occur to me when she was with us? Even though I'm her daughter, I had no idea, so how alone must she have felt with other people? How unfair is it that all she did was sacrifice everything for us, and she wasn't understood by anyone?
One woman. That woman disappeared, bit by bit, having forgotten the joy of being born and her childhood and dreams, marrying before her first period and having five children and raising them. The woman who, at least when it came to her children, wasn't surprised or thrown off by anything. The woman whose life was marred with sacrifice until the day she went missing.
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Follows the efforts of a family to find the mother who went missing from Seoul Station and their sobering realizations when they recall memories that suggest she may not have been happy.

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