Novel
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Third translation by the Korean author, a novel haunted by war centered on a mother and her two daughters.
“You don’t have to force yourself to be a good girl.” said the brother to his sister Han Sejin. The conversation takes place on the phone: Han Mansu lives far away and the youngest of the family recounts how she accompanied their mother Yi Sunil to the inter-Korean border to take care of the grandfather’s bones. “A good girl ? /Han Sejin replied that it wasn’t that. /Han Sejin thought it wasn’t that. Seeing her mother’s smile when she invited her to go and greet her grandfather, to do so for the last time, anyone would have felt sad and that was all. But about that she didn’t say a word.”
After I go like this, this new novel by the Korean Hwang Jungeun takes us into the heart of a family where the unsaid, the necessary forgetting of “so many terrible stories” create a cottony decor of solitude. The structure of the book increases the differences in points of view. A good girl is made up of four texts each constituting a work in itself which “create, once brought together, a new possibility of reading”, note the translators. The three main characters – the mother, her youngest daughter and her eldest Han Yongjin – thus appear in different lights, while the novelist constantly goes back and forth between the present of the book and the mental flows of one or the ‘other.
Autumn Mountain
“Mom ! To what
