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변경 #12
변경
288 pages
Published December 7, 1998
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July 8, 2020
Regarded by the author as his magnum opus, this twelve-book epic novel _Border_ is a major tour-de-force in its storytelling, conceptual depth, and insight into contemporary South Korean society. The novel begins in the late 1950s, when the April Revolution of 1960 was increasingly becoming an inevitability, and ends in the immediate aftermath of October Yusin in 1972, through which Park Chung Hee assumed almost all governing power to rule Korea as president for life. The story is told in alternating perspectives from three siblings of a family: the first son Myeonghun, first daughter Yeonghui, and second son Incheol (the second daughter Okgyeong remains a minor character until the last two or three books).
What unites the family, as well as makes them fall apart, is the absence of the father, who crossed the 38th parallel to North Korea prior to the beginning of the novel. Although this is a relatively familiar trope in literature, in this epic novel, the father's absence is more than a mere lack of presence. The father, as the characters constantly remind the reader, was a son of an illustrious family, distinguished by its erudition. By fleeing to the North by his own will--and not bothering to bring his family with him--he renders the life of his wife and his children all the more precarious, in particular due to the guilt-by-association system that was in place for decades in postwar South Korea. This law, which was not abolished until as late as 1980, effectively blocked all pathways to upward social and economic mobility to those associated with real and suspected "commies." The chapters in alternating perspectives show how each member of the family struggles to survive this structural discrimination: Myeonghun becomes a backstreet gangster, a farmer, and then an owner of a restaurant-brothel; Yeonghui becomes a mistress, a prostitute, then a wife to a middle class family; Incheol, too, works numerous menial jobs to continue his studies, later dropping out from college to become a writer; Okgyeong reaches adulthood and becomes a factory worker in the 1970s when Korea was being industrialized at breakneck speed. Although the family is united by a shared sense of guilt--and along with it longing, resentment, and sadness--its members must bear their own tribulations alone, at times not even knowing if one another is still alive, for they are a family without a home.
The absence of the father, of course, is part of the larger trauma that the South Korean society endures as an American neocolony in the Cold War. As suggested by its title, the novel is interspersed with reflections upon the nature of Cold War South Korea, wherein Yi Munyol posits the war and division of Korea into two Koreas as a consequence of the clash between the American and Soviet empires. As Yi repeats throughout, any ideological concession made in South Korea by the United States is not merely a loss but also a gain for North Korea and the Soviet Union. The stakes of the Cold War were thus particularly high in Korea, where the two empires marked their borders at the 38th parallel. The novel hence is also an exploration into how such geopolitical climate conditions the psyche of South Koreans, who lived (and are still living) through this collective trauma.
Although epic novels have now become more of a rarity in Korean literature, I have thoroughly enjoyed Yi Munyol's _Border_. I hope it gets translated someday for a wider audience beyond readers of Korean!
What unites the family, as well as makes them fall apart, is the absence of the father, who crossed the 38th parallel to North Korea prior to the beginning of the novel. Although this is a relatively familiar trope in literature, in this epic novel, the father's absence is more than a mere lack of presence. The father, as the characters constantly remind the reader, was a son of an illustrious family, distinguished by its erudition. By fleeing to the North by his own will--and not bothering to bring his family with him--he renders the life of his wife and his children all the more precarious, in particular due to the guilt-by-association system that was in place for decades in postwar South Korea. This law, which was not abolished until as late as 1980, effectively blocked all pathways to upward social and economic mobility to those associated with real and suspected "commies." The chapters in alternating perspectives show how each member of the family struggles to survive this structural discrimination: Myeonghun becomes a backstreet gangster, a farmer, and then an owner of a restaurant-brothel; Yeonghui becomes a mistress, a prostitute, then a wife to a middle class family; Incheol, too, works numerous menial jobs to continue his studies, later dropping out from college to become a writer; Okgyeong reaches adulthood and becomes a factory worker in the 1970s when Korea was being industrialized at breakneck speed. Although the family is united by a shared sense of guilt--and along with it longing, resentment, and sadness--its members must bear their own tribulations alone, at times not even knowing if one another is still alive, for they are a family without a home.
The absence of the father, of course, is part of the larger trauma that the South Korean society endures as an American neocolony in the Cold War. As suggested by its title, the novel is interspersed with reflections upon the nature of Cold War South Korea, wherein Yi Munyol posits the war and division of Korea into two Koreas as a consequence of the clash between the American and Soviet empires. As Yi repeats throughout, any ideological concession made in South Korea by the United States is not merely a loss but also a gain for North Korea and the Soviet Union. The stakes of the Cold War were thus particularly high in Korea, where the two empires marked their borders at the 38th parallel. The novel hence is also an exploration into how such geopolitical climate conditions the psyche of South Koreans, who lived (and are still living) through this collective trauma.
Although epic novels have now become more of a rarity in Korean literature, I have thoroughly enjoyed Yi Munyol's _Border_. I hope it gets translated someday for a wider audience beyond readers of Korean!
Displaying 1 of 1 review