Meeting with my brother : a novella /

*Starred Review* The Korean War displaced and fragmented more than ten million families, writes Fenkl in his introduction to his new translation of Yi's novella about the first meeting between two adult brothers. Yi, one of Korea's most prominent literary figures, and his family were perilously victimized by the division of Korea. His father abandoned his mother and five young children to defect to the north in 1950, marking the family as guilty-by-communist-association targets. Yi learned of his father's fate in the mid-1980s: 30 years in prison camps, a second wife, five more children. Yi expands on his own history through a fictional alter ego who travels from Seoul to the Chinese-North Korean border to meet the eldest North Korean son of his late father. Their shared parentage contrasts sharply with their divergent experiences on either side of the DMZ. Originally published in 1994 in Korea and translated in 2002 by Suh Ji-moon as An Appointment with My Brother, this edition is the propitious result of Fenkl and Chang's direct work with Yi and includes an additional scene. At less than 100 pages, Meeting with My Brother might seem spare, but Yi's exploration of identity, family, citizenship, and nationhood is urgently profound and deeply compelling.--Hong, Terry Copyright 2017 Booklist

A modest but quietly controversial look at two very different Koreas, questioning long-held orthodoxies.North Korea is widely held to be among the world's most awful places. But, suggests prolific South Korean novelist Yi in a moment that seems almost calculated to draw official scrutiny, perhaps it's not so awful as all that. Says the North Korean half brother of a South Korean professor during a not entirely planned-out reunion, asked how he's doing, "Do you want me to tell you how we're starving and can't get enough corn gruel to eat?" Conversely, the North Korean semblable wonders how it is that the invading Americans managed to miss their chance to massacre his newly found half brother and his family during the war. Yi's premise is fruitful: it was the South Korean's father with whom he was to be reunited, having fled to the North in sympathy with the Communists during the war; that he has other family across the barbed wire is a surprise to him. It is also a surprise for him to learn that his life is as strictly regimented as any in the land of the Kim dynasty: "I could be arrested under the National Security Law," the South Korean allows, "for illegally crossing the border and having a clandestine meeting." Yi gets in a few sly digs at both stereotypes and their perpetrators, as when, recounting an academic summit, he depicts the South Koreans as more doctrinaire than their northern brethren: "I tried to introduce the South Koreans to people who were a bit more open-minded and less political," says a cultural emissary, "since they themselves seemed to have a bit of ahow should I put it?radical slant." Yi's novella complicates our understanding of relations between North and South, warring places so different that reconciliationto say nothing of reunificationseems impossible. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.