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The moving castle
English, Korean (translation)
366 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
20 people want to read
About the author
Hwang Sun-won
22 books19 followersSee: 황순원
Hwang Sun-wŏn was a Korean short story writer, novelist, and poet.
Hwang Sun-wŏn was a Korean short story writer, novelist, and poet.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 7, 2017
"The Moving Castle", by Sun-won Hwang, is a book with interesting ideas, interesting conversations and more or less interesting characters that gets undone by poor execution, bad pace and little flow.
The story centers on different characters that live around Seoul. All their stories interrelate to each other in different ways: the priest is friends with that woman who gets to know that guy that is married to that other woman who knows a woman who is engaged to that friend of the priest, etc., etc. The author jumps from one character to the other, little vignettes that help develop their arc and to show how they all relate to each other. Unfortunately, the delivery fails, and the stories lack energy and interest. It is strange, because some ideas, about love, or relationships, or shamanism, are interesting, but the end product ends being less than the sum of its parts. It could be, in part, because of the translation. Now, it must be difficult, especially back on those days when Korean was not so popular, to translate a book into a foreign language; in this case, English. However, the translation is uneven, and there are some orthographic mistakes within the text that could have been avoided. Maybe the rhythm was lost in the translation. But maybe it was never there, because it looks as if Sun-won Hwang just wanted to create little moments, and maybe he forgot to give cohesion to his story.
All in all, "The Moving Castle" will be interesting enough for fans of the author or Korean culture. But there is nothing there that makes it stand out of the pack.
5.5/10
(English Translation by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton; original in Korean)
The story centers on different characters that live around Seoul. All their stories interrelate to each other in different ways: the priest is friends with that woman who gets to know that guy that is married to that other woman who knows a woman who is engaged to that friend of the priest, etc., etc. The author jumps from one character to the other, little vignettes that help develop their arc and to show how they all relate to each other. Unfortunately, the delivery fails, and the stories lack energy and interest. It is strange, because some ideas, about love, or relationships, or shamanism, are interesting, but the end product ends being less than the sum of its parts. It could be, in part, because of the translation. Now, it must be difficult, especially back on those days when Korean was not so popular, to translate a book into a foreign language; in this case, English. However, the translation is uneven, and there are some orthographic mistakes within the text that could have been avoided. Maybe the rhythm was lost in the translation. But maybe it was never there, because it looks as if Sun-won Hwang just wanted to create little moments, and maybe he forgot to give cohesion to his story.
All in all, "The Moving Castle" will be interesting enough for fans of the author or Korean culture. But there is nothing there that makes it stand out of the pack.
5.5/10
(English Translation by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton; original in Korean)
Displaying 1 of 1 review