This year the desire for it to be Fall is a bit more intense than usual, probably because this Summer has been more intense than usual. I won’t bore you with my existential crisis caused by climate change; I’m sure you have your own, but as Jason Diamond said in his latest issue of The Melt, “This Summer has been strange.”
Book Festivals aside, we’re finally moving into the time of year when my favorite fashion, books, and weather coincide. August has many charms – not the least of which is the first of the big, fat Fall books that begin drifting in right about now. 2023 is shaping up to be a literary doozy, with publishers starting even earlier than usual with the chunksters. Scribe published the Korean writer Hwang Sok-yong’s Mater 2-10 in mid-July, a friendly companion to the Zainichi (Japanese of Korean descent) writer Yu Miri’s The End of August, out this month from Riverhead Press. I have an upcoming review in Words Without Borders of the latter which I’ll post a link to when it is available.
We’ve seen a lot of translations of South Korean writers over the last decade (Yu Miri writes in Japanese, but her work centers around the Korean experience), and not just from Indie presses. It’s a trend I’ve been casually following since 2016 when Mythili G. Rao wrote about Korea’s quest for The Nobel Prize for Literature for The New Yorker. Incidentally, 2016 was the same year the controversial translation of Hang Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian, won the Man Booker International Prize. Whale, by Cheon Myeong-kwan, was shortlisted for this year’s Prize but lost to the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. Possibly as a result, The Korean Times featured a piece on its Opinion page in May titled “Globalization of Korean Literature.” It appears the quest for the Nobel continues.
The South Korean government’s funding of English language translations reminds me of the suspect ol’ days when the CIA soft-power-flexed by funding literary magazines such as The Paris Review and the UK journal Furioso as part of their fight against the “Reds.” Unsurprisingly, South Korea has its own literary journal, Korean Literature Now, which I’ve subscribed to and enjoyed for years. I highly recommend it if you have even a passing interest in the topic. Barely related, I just found three original issues of Furiouso – one from 1947 & two from 1948 -- in really nice condition at a little used bookshop in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. They might be my coolest (admittedly, a relative term) purchase of the Summer. The Summer 1947 issue, in particular, features a short story by William Faulkner I’d never heard of, titled “Afternoon of a Cow,” and published under the pseudonym Ernest V. Trueblood. Faulkner later incorporated it into his Snopes Trilogy – a cycle of novels that deserve much more attention than they get.
Using literature as an unseen mycelial network connecting countries and cultures can be effective. A few months ago, I had the pleasure of helping organize and pack the library of a Middle Eastern scholar, preparing it to be sent to its new home. On the last day, I talked with the scholar’s wife about the book I was reading, which happened to be Yu Miri’s. I tried to verbalize the strangeness I sometimes experience while reading Asian novels. I lack familiarity with Eastern religions in general and those based on Shamanistic traditions in particular. She summed it up succinctly, saying I was stepping outside of the “Abrahamic faiths” – a term I’d never considered but find so compelling I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for a way to insert it into one of my reviews ever since. Shamanism features heavily in two of the three Hwang Sok-yong novels I’ve read (Familiar Things & Princes Bari) and is a crucial component of Yu’s The End of August. Amazingly, these are the first places I’ve encountered in-depth, accessible explorations of the subject. For that alone, I’d recommend these two writers, who have never appeared on a Nobel Prize betting list, to my knowledge. Of course, cultural exchanges aside, they can be read for all the usual reasons we read fiction: wonderful stories, beautiful prose, and interesting, fleshed-out characters.
I can’t say reading Korean literature has spurred in me a desire to visit Seoul outside of books (I don’t travel that much, and there are other places higher on my list). Still, I enjoy it, which seems precisely the point of using cultural goods as soft power. To create some sense of connection, however tenuous or even unrealistic, with people we will never meet and places we may never see, based on experiences we can never share but which we all still fundamentally understand. I doubt that is the criteria the Nobel Committee judges by, but to my mind, they could do worse.
I have fallen in love with South Korean literature as it was recently introduced to me from someone I respect and love! Thank you for the post!