"The days of our youth are probably now nothing but photographs in some treasured album, yellowing and fading like memories over time."

Park Minwoo is a successful Seoul architect in his 60's, though he grew up in one of the shantytowns on the hills surrounding the city. As he ages, he begins to look back on his past, and how he got to where he is today. He thinks frequently of his first love, the daughter of the noodle-maker in the shantytown. As teenagers, they bonded over a mutual love of reading and the desire for an education. They have been out of touch for years, when he receives a cryptic message from her.

In sections that alternate with Minwoo's story, we get the story of a young woman struggling to get by in present day Seoul (both sections are in the first person). She works days as a playwright/director/jack-of-all-trades at fringe urban theater (generally unpaid), and then rushes to her all-night job as a convenience store clerk before heading home for a few hours of sleep in a mold-infested basement.

As the sections progress, we wonder how these two lives will intersect.

I liked this quiet introspective novel quite a lot. It seems to give a realistic and detailed look at what life is like for many in present day Seoul. I would like to read more by this author.

3 1/2 stars ( )

Hwang Sok-yong's book is an adept critique of Korean modernization. The story sucked me in and I couldn't stop reading it. I sit here wondering how the author can end a book with such sadness and poignancy and still leave you feeling satisfied that the book ends well and ends the way it should.

It struck me that in the late 80s through the mid 90s, I was living in Korea when this huge growth spurt was just beginning. My introduction to Korea as an english teacher was going out every night to a street vendor (a pojangmacha...a sort of large picnic table on wheels with the food prep taking place on one side and benches for customers on the other) and having dinner...lunch was in a small cinder-block building with a metal corrugated roof that made the best bokkumbap (fried rice) and ramen!

People all around me were making a living doing simple commerce...shoeshine, food vendors, selling kitchen goods, etc...Some of the areas around Choryang-dong in downtown Busan, where I worked, were run-down, some areas had newer modern office buildings, but it had not become the streamlined, glitzy, k-pop, multi-media economic powerhouse that it is today. Much of this way of life has disappeared now, especially in the big cities like Seoul and Busan. I miss it whenever we go back.

Quibbles? Only that the same translator, Sora Kim-Russell, translated The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun which I read last year and I still struggle with her english word choice. Some of her vocabulary seems outdated as if she is using 1950s Korean-English dictionaries.

Regardless, Kim-Russell, did an excellent job of translation overall and I definitely want to read more of Hwang Sok-yong's books.
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Hwang Sok-yong is a renowned Korean writer who is both an author and a political activist. He was imprisoned in the 1990s for having gone to North Korea.

This is a short but densely packed novel. Park is a successful architect in his late middle age. Park was one of the only two children in his slum neighborhood who went to high school and he went on to attend the most prestigious university in South Korea. He is married and has a daughter, but his daughter settled in the US after her medical training and his wife went to stay with her and never returned. So while he's materially and professionally successful, Park's personal life is much less rewarding.

Alternating with Park's story is that of Jung Woohee, a 29-year-old woman who directs plays in a small fringe theater and works in a convenience store at night to support herself. She has a mother and sister who live in another, smaller city whom she rarely sees. Woohee is committed to being an artist but wonders if she'll ever escape her marginal existence. She lives in a mildewed bedsit and has one friend, the slightly older Kim Minwoo, who is also barely making it, working in contract construction jobs until recently when he was laid off. They're not romantically involved, perhaps because they don't see how they can make a joint life together, but they are close. They're disaffected and frustrated but they both keep going.

So you have the older character who overcame his disadvantages and gained great success in South Korea's celebrated economic and social transformation but who finds himself with little beyond money to show for it. And you have a millenial character who has grown up in this supposedly better world but can't create a life that is both fulfilling and secure. If the point of the older generation's efforts was to make a world in which succeeding generations could reap the benefits, Hwang makes it clear that that isn't happening unless they are willing to leverage personal advantages and/or bend the rules.

The connection between the two storylines becomes clearer about two-thirds of the way through, when Woohee becomes friendly with Kim Minwoo's mother, who has a childhood connection with Park. Slowly the stories merge, at first somewhat predictably and then in a way that took me by surprise.

This is a very melancholy novel. No one is really happy and the lives of the characters grow sadder as time goes on. Park's affluent lifestyle can't protect him from the consequences of the various choices he makes as he climbs the ladder of success, and his choices have had ramifications for many other people as well. It's not so much that he can't escape his past as that his present and other people's futures are shaped by intended and unintended consequences of individual and collective decisions in the past. In that way it's a universal story, or at least one that resonates beyond the South Korean context even though the novel is firmly rooted in that context.

The language is spare and direct. The characters aren't deeply drawn but they came alive on the page for me. I am quite unfamiliar with Korean literature so I can't place this in that critical and informational context or in the context of the author's other work, but I found the book effective and moving. ( )

A subtle, quiet book with twin narratives that, as the book progresses, slowly converge. It is a meditation on family and our past memories, and on how we move on from our childhood and our hometowns. It is also a snapshot of how, in a fast-paced developing nation like Korea, the past is often swept away in the rush towards modernisation. A little gem of a book from one of Korea's foremost writers. ( )