Kung-Sook Shin

Shin Kyung-Sook (as her name would appear in Korean, with the family name first) was born in 1963 in a small South Korean farming village. Like the parents in her novel, her parents were farmers who couldn't afford to send her to school, so like the writer-daughter in the novel, she went to live with her older brother in Seoul. She worked in an electronics plant while she attended night school. Her first novel was published in 1985, and she is widely read in Korea and parts of Europe. In 1995, her novel A Lone Room received Korea's Manhae Prize, and in 2009 it received France's Prix de l'Inaperçu (prize for the unnoticed/underappreciated) award. It has been translated into English by the American PEN Center, but  hasn't found a publisher. It tells the story of "an intellectually ambitious young girl struggling to survive as a sweatshop worker in the 1970s." Her most recent novel, the one we are reading, Please Look After Mom, is the work that has brought her broad international recognition. For this work, in 2011, she became the first woman to receive the Man Asian Literary Prize. Below is a YouTube clip of her award acceptance. She speaks in Korean, and her speech is translated to English by a translator.

Here is a 2-part interview posted in the blog of a student of Korean literature at Columbia University.

Part 1 and Part 2.

Random Korean Cultural References

 Hanbok: Traditional Korean dress worn on semiformal or formal traditional occasions.

 
Kimchi: Traditional food staple of Korea, made from fermented cabbage, garlic, ginger, and peppers.

Panchan (or banchan): Small dishes of cooked food served with rice.

Perilla (leaves and seeds): An herb of the mint family used in Korean cooking. The leaves are said to taste like "a combination of apples and mint," and the taste of the seeds is said to resemble sesame (though perilla is not related to sesame).

Chindo (or jindo) dog: This is a medium-sized dog traditionally used for hunting. Like the Australian dingo dog, it is a local feral dog that has been domesticated.

Traditional Korean country-style house: This is from a Unesco heritage site.

Rice-paper doors: It took me a while to figure out that this was what they were talking about. I kept picturing the mom pasting rice paper on a solid-wood western-type door.

High-rise apartment block in Seoul: Supposedly, this design is very innovative in that it has internal hubs that compel the occupants to interact.

Seoul Metro: Actually, the Seoul subway system has 400 stations. This image is from a photo project to shoot images from all 400 stations.

Nominees for March through June 2012

 Below are the books nominated for March through June of next year. Please read through the brief descriptions below. The descriptions without quotes are as submitted by the nominators. The descriptions in quotes were cut and pasted from Amazon.com. Select your favorite four and email your selections to psunlane@yahoo.com.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller –  “Details one man's opportunity to edit his life as if he were a character in a movie.”

Bringing Up Bébé by  Pamela Druckerman – Memoir about American in Paris raising a child, learning from the French ways of child-rearing.

In-flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson – Sounds like a fun collection of short stories by a contemporary British author.

Riding the Bus with my Sister by Rachel Simon – About having a disabled sister (and she apparently wrote a novel, too, The Story of Beautiful Girl).

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje –  “In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship crosses the Indian Ocean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another...”

The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee – “A magnificent, profoundly humane ‘biography’ of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.”

The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls – A friend of mine from another book group said that her group loved the book.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides – It is #8 on the Bay Area paperback best seller list.  It is also a staff recommendation for the SF Chronicle by Orinda Books.  “It is a coming of age novel about three Brown graduates who find and lose love and each other as they emerge from the groves of academe.”

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern – “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians…”

The Paris Wife by Paula McClain –  “A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.”

The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes – “This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present.”

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller –  “In this new twist on the Trojan War story, Patroclus and Achilles are the quintessential mismatched pair--a mortal underdog exiled in shame and a glorious demigod revered by all--but what would a novel of ancient Greece be without star-crossed love?”

Zahra’s Paradise by Amir and Khalil – Contemporary Iran in a graphic novel.

Saturday, September 8, 2012, 2 p.m. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I was at the wrap-up dinner for the adult reading program a couple of weeks ago, and we touched briefly on Tinker, Tailor..., which we all agreed could be somewhat confusing as it starts close to the end and is told in a very nonlinear fashion, so I declared, with much grandiosity, that I would undertake to write a timeline of the story told in a chronologically linear fashion. Well, I started that last week, and it started to be almost as long as the actual book, so I am starting over with a much less detailed timeline pulled from my memory. There are bound to be gaps which you can help me fill in at the discussion. There will be spoilers. In fact, the biggest spoiler shows up right at the beginning, so I am going to put the type in a light color that you have to select to read in order to not give anything away to those who haven't finished the book. You have to select it to read it.

John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Outlined Chronologically

Before World War II:  Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux are at university together. Percy Alleline is at university, and Control is a professor. Karla is in London for a while (cover unknown). Bill Haydon is recruited into a group of pro-communist spies. 

In the early post-war period: Smiley, Prideaux, Alleline, Haydon, and Control are all working for "the Circus," Smiley has also recruited Roy Bland and is soon to recruit Toby Esterhase. Karla is caught in the US and shipped back to Russia via India. Smiley goes to India to try to turn Karla and loses a key piece of information to Karla, along with his cigarette lighter.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1960's: Somewhere along the line, Bill Haydon has an affair with Smiley's wife, Ann. Percy Alleline comes up with an unbelievably fruitful source of Soviet intelligence, Source Merlin, whose product is dubbed "Witchcraft." From the beginning, Control believes that Witchcraft is a fraud and sets out to prove it. Witchcraft gains support among various ministries and is given a huge budget and its own safe-house, location unknown to even Control. Connie Sachs, who is working in the research department, partly through sources in the Netherlands and Japan, identifies a cultural attaché at the Soviet embassy, Polyakov, as "a six-cylinder Karla-trained hood if ever I saw one." This "hood" has a legman who is working under the cover name of "Lapin." Connie communications up the chain of command to Percy Alleline, and is shoved out of the Circus into enforced retirement.

Sometime in the late 60's after the Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia (1968): Control is approached by someone offering him a defector, a disillusioned Czech general, who has some important information about a high-level spy within the Circus. Control requisitions the services of Jim Prideaux to go to Brno, Czechoslovakia, to contact and retrieve the general. Control tells Prideaux about his suspicions of top officers in the Circus, The night before he leaves, Prideaux tries to reach the two men he trusts, Smiley and Haydon. According to Jerry Westerby, meanwhile, near Brno, in the woods around the farmhouse where Prideaux is to contact the Czech general, Russian and Czech troops are massing, with the Russians running everything, even before Jim arrives. As soon as he arrives in Brno, Prideaux realizes his cover is blown but tries to shake his surveillance and go through with the assignment anyway. He is shot, captured, tortured, accused of trying to assassinate a Czech general, and then swapped back to the British. Control is exposed and disgraced, forced out of the service along with anyone close to him, including Smiley. Sam Collins, the man who was on duty at the Circus the night of Prideaux's capture, calls Smiley's house when the spit hits the spam. Smiley is not there, but Bill Haydon shows up shortly, saying he got the news on the wire at his club

In 1973, at the present time of the story: Control is dead. Jim Prideaux has recovered from his wounds and is working as French instructor at a private boys school. Smiley is in retirement and at loose ends. He is commandeered by his former protegee, Peter Guillam, and taken to meet with the government overseer of intelligence matters, Oliver Lacon, and one of the Circus' former shady operatives, Ricki Tarr, who had disappeared, presumed defected, 6 months earlier in Hong Kong. Tarr tells Smiley of a potential Soviet defector who was hustled back to Russia to be tortured and shot as soon as Tarr contacted London about her. Irina had left behind a diary where she named a former lover of hers, Ivlov, as "Lapin" former dogsbody in the London Soviet embassy, names Polyakov as a General Viktorov, known graduate of Karla's spy school, and tells of a mole, "Gerald," a high-ranking official within the circus, who is being handled by Polyakov/Viktorov. From there, Smiley follows the clues to expose Bill Haydon as the mole. (You can finish the rest for me; I have to get ready for work).