Review by Choice Review
Hwang Sok-yong is one of South Korea's best-known contemporary novelists; he published this title in Korean in 1991. In the 17th century the word "guest" was used to refer to smallpox, an alien disease brought into Korea by Westerners. In this story, the word alludes to two other foreign "guests"--communism in the north and Christianity in the south. During the Korean War, unspeakable atrocities were committed against the local Koreans in the province of Huanghae over a 50-day period. North Korea has insisted that the perpetrators were American soldiers, but the author did some research and determined that in fact Koreans in Huanghae, Christians and communists, were slaughtering each other. When the leading character in this novel, the Reverend Ryu Yosop, visits his homeland in North Korea for the first time in 40 years, he uncovers many ugly truths, which include his recently deceased brother's personal involvement in the brutal killings. This powerful story moves back and forth between the worlds of the living and the dead, the past and the present, to reach a profoundly disturbing conclusion. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers; all levels. J. W. Walls Simon Fraser University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
One of Korea's foremost writers presents a moving family saga juxtaposed against the horrors of the Korean War. Barely a week after Ryu Yosop's brother, Yohan, dies in New Jersey, Yosop leaves his Brooklyn home to travel to North Korea's Hwanghae Province, where they both grew up. Their village was the setting of a massacre over 40 years earlier, gruesome killings at first attributed to the American military but which in reality resulted from the violent conflict between Christian and communist Koreans. Upon his return, Yosup is visited by the spirits of family members, murdered villagers, and those who participated in the killings. He learns that his brother, Yohan, actively took part in the massacre--torturing and killing at least 10 people in their own village. Hwang has brilliantly crafted a novel that serves as an exorcism that allows the dead and the living to share, in alternating voices, their stories and memories. By combining lyrical prose with painful subject matter--atrocities committed in the name of ideological superiority--Hwang achieves stunning results. --Deborah Donovan Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Vivid snapshots from the Korean War and surreal encounters with ghosts intersect in this first major U.S. release by award-winning Korean novelist Sok-Yong. The result-threaded with gritty religious and political undertones-is an ambitious exploration of a postwar survivor's chaotic psyche. Rev. Ryu Yosop, an elderly minister living in New Jersey, is stalked by memories of the horrific 52-day massacre he witnessed 40 years ago in North Korea's Hwanghae Province, where his older brother Yohan played a leading role in the carnage. To confront his past, Yosop returns to his hometown of Ch'ansaemgol for the first time since he immigrated to America 20 years earlier. Drifting between the past and the present, among the living and the dead, Yosop yearns to appease and exorcise the spirits that haunt him. Yosop's struggle becomes truly gripping as he reunites with long-lost family members in North Korea. Chaperoned by Communist Party members who resolutely blame past atrocities on the American military, Yosop remembers all too well that it was his own Christian and Communist neighbors who committed the bloodshed. Though the time-traveling prose takes some getting used to, Sok-Yong eloquently chronicles Yosop's odyssey through guilt, fear, faith and forgiveness. Author tour. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Expert, idiomatic translation renders visible a story that helps explain the present weirdness in North Korea. Full marks to translators Chun and West for deft work with Hwang's excellent depiction of the vicious, nearly lunatic clash between Christians and communists in the period between the end of World War II, when the Japanese colonial masters were ousted, and the Korean War. Ryu Yosop is a Presbyterian minister in New York who, like his older brother Yohan, emigrated from Korea to America. Yohan, also a church officer, has been living alone, his sons off in western states, his wife dead. When Yohan himself dies, days after a prickly meeting with his younger brother, and just before a long-planned trip back to their ancestral village, Yosop makes the trip instead, taking with him some of Yohan's cremated remains. Yosop does not travel alone. He is accompanied by his brother's ghost and the ghost of a servant, representing sides in the horrifying battle for control of the country half a century ago. Hwang coolly presents the chaotic reality of the post-war period, revealing a story much different from that presented by the modern-day totalitarian government. A museum of horrors supposedly visited on a village by Americans, for example, is discovered to have been perpetrated by others. Further truths are exposed as Yosop is taken to meet the wife and son Yohan abandoned when he fled the country. Requires patient reading, but the story, with its great insight into the region, is deeply rewarding. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
