Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook

For the general readership, especially the younger group, the novel would be read as a universal coming-of-age story, about how a young girl overcomes the challenges of poverty and other social obstacles. The biggest appeal of this book is that it can be read in many different ways by readers with different tastes and of different backgrounds, age groups, etc.

Comprised of four chapters, this hefty 400-page book is made up of fragmented scenes and sections, cutting back and forth between the past and the present, and the overall pace is brisk despite its length.

The result is a carefully crafted and richly layered portrayal of not only her experience and of the people she encountered, but of the relationship between an individual and the world around her, of how one comes to an understanding of one’s own experiences in the midst of sweeping social change. This strategy lays bare all the conflict and confusion that Shin goes through as she confronts a past that she has long kept buried. In A Lone Room, Shin has reconstructed the story that follows as a work of metafiction, a first-person narrative told in the writer’s own voice, closely tracking the process of revisiting and writing her past. This means sharing a single airless room with her cousin and older brother in a sooty neighborhood, going to work at a stereo assembly line to make barely enough money to bring food to the table, so that she would be eligible to apply for a government scholarship to attend night school. Her only choice was to stay where there was nothing for her, or to move to Seoul, as millions of other country girls did back then, and take her place at the bottom of the city’s social hierarchy. In 1978, the author was a 15-year-old in a remote rural village in southern Korea, one of many children in a farming family, just graduated from middle school and unable to afford high school. It is the kind of ambitious and at the same time intimate novel that will convince readers of Shin’s capacities as a major writer with an important story to tell, and the courage and the artistic finesse to tell it. Set against the backdrop of Korea’s industrial sweatshops of the 1970s, the book takes on many of the urgent socio-political issues of the era-exploitation, oppression, activism, urbanization-weaving them into a complex and nuanced coming-of-age story. Picqueir/France, sold to Pegasus Books WEL, hardcover publication in US –September 2015, Nha Nam/Vietnam.įirst published in 1995, Korean writer Shin Kyung-sook’s second novel A Lone Room is a stark autobiographical work depicting her teen-age years as a new arrival in the city, working in a factory to attend night school. Kyung-Sook Shin Books The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness

Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook