Kyung-Sook Shin's "Please Look After Mom" is, perhaps, one of the strangest books I've read, though I don't mean to belittle Shin's work by saying so. The novel is strange in all the right ways, written almost entirely in second-person perspective and shifting viewpoints between four different characters. This is certainly an unusual technique, especially in a work of this length, yet somehow, Shin pulls it off without a hitch. The book explores the history of mom's interactions with her family members after she mysteriously disappears in a Soeul subway station and is written primarily as a series of thoughts and memories. Many of these memories involve a combination of fear, nostalgia, and regret, and as a result of Shin's use of second person, the reader is quickly thrown into the situations and emotions that mom's family find themselves dealing with. In some way, the constant use of the pronoun "you" seems both inclusive and alien for the reader. We truly feel what the characters are feeling, yet we somehow simultaneously experience a strong sensation of disconnectedness, a feeling that we are spiraling out of control as a result of difficult circumstances and are trapped in an almost out-of-body experience. It seems to me that Shin must intent this response in her readers as a means of communicating these truths about grief and loss, and if so, she succeeds brilliantly.
Even more impressive than her successful use of second-person perspective is Shin's success at introducing and developing complex characters within that stylistic approach. The husband of the lost mother, in particular, is an intriguing character for me, trapped in some sort of restless tension and a slave to his own ever-changing desires. It would be easy to cast and often-absent father as the villain of the story, but Shin instead introduces us to a man living in deep regret and trying to make sense of both his love for his family and his desire to be free of the seemingly oppressive and unceasingly dull obligations of a first-born son in traditional, rural Korean society.
"Please Look After Mom" is not, as a whole, what I expected it to be, yet it is an incredibly rich and cleverly crafted piece of literature, impressive in it's subtle complexity and technical excellence.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Don't Miss the Point
Literature, for me, is perhaps one of the most "human" things we do, yet the task of creating literature is one that not even those with much practice and experience fully understand. Literature is, in the most basic sense, concerned with digging through the layers of our humanity; churning up the soil, and trying to point out, using whatever means necessary, something true about humans. Literature, or at least good literature, asks questions about why we live, how we live, and how we live with each other, and the best literature can take on a life of its own, providing the author with some fresh perspective on our humanity even as she writes.
Because literature seems to possess an almost prophetic power, it has been the subject of human fascination for centuries. Even before human beings wrote stories down, oral traditions carried on tales through generation after generation, holding them in the highest esteem because they connected both listener and storyteller to some greater reality, some larger picture than the mundane, the understandable, and the close at hand. This connection to some higher reality and this ability to transport a reader or storyteller beyond himself also makes great literature, in some sense, timeless. In the year 2012, in Upstate New York, we read Homer, Shakespeare, and Steinbeck, not because we are disproportionately concerned with ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, or the Depression-era Southwest, but because each holds within its pages something profoundly true about our experience as humans, something that makes us laugh and cry and wonder despite the fact that we are far removed in both time and place.
These concerns, I think, are central to our understanding of literature. We can, in the academic community, spend incredible time and effort dissecting a text, searching word-by-word for the author's intent, her clever use of language, and her manipulation of the readers' response. These activities may, for a time, be worthwhile, but if authors wrote novels, plays, and poetry merely as a technical exercise, as a way of manipulating worlds to flex their intellectual muscle, literature would carry little merit outside the academy. Thankfully, the elements we so carefully deconstruct and analyze are mere tools that serve the greater purpose of communicating that someone, somewhere, at some time thought profoundly worthwhile.
As I read a number of works for three different literature courses this semester, my goal is to keep in mind the purpose of literature and to always reference that larger concern even as I examine the details before me. I hope that as an English major, I take a magnifying glass to the details, the tools, in order that I might better understand how the larger purpose is successfully accomplished. I hope that I can always be sure to make connections that broaden my perspective and teach me about something greater, even, that literature itself. I hope I don't miss the point.
Because literature seems to possess an almost prophetic power, it has been the subject of human fascination for centuries. Even before human beings wrote stories down, oral traditions carried on tales through generation after generation, holding them in the highest esteem because they connected both listener and storyteller to some greater reality, some larger picture than the mundane, the understandable, and the close at hand. This connection to some higher reality and this ability to transport a reader or storyteller beyond himself also makes great literature, in some sense, timeless. In the year 2012, in Upstate New York, we read Homer, Shakespeare, and Steinbeck, not because we are disproportionately concerned with ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, or the Depression-era Southwest, but because each holds within its pages something profoundly true about our experience as humans, something that makes us laugh and cry and wonder despite the fact that we are far removed in both time and place.
These concerns, I think, are central to our understanding of literature. We can, in the academic community, spend incredible time and effort dissecting a text, searching word-by-word for the author's intent, her clever use of language, and her manipulation of the readers' response. These activities may, for a time, be worthwhile, but if authors wrote novels, plays, and poetry merely as a technical exercise, as a way of manipulating worlds to flex their intellectual muscle, literature would carry little merit outside the academy. Thankfully, the elements we so carefully deconstruct and analyze are mere tools that serve the greater purpose of communicating that someone, somewhere, at some time thought profoundly worthwhile.
As I read a number of works for three different literature courses this semester, my goal is to keep in mind the purpose of literature and to always reference that larger concern even as I examine the details before me. I hope that as an English major, I take a magnifying glass to the details, the tools, in order that I might better understand how the larger purpose is successfully accomplished. I hope that I can always be sure to make connections that broaden my perspective and teach me about something greater, even, that literature itself. I hope I don't miss the point.
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