Respone to Kyung-Sook Shin's "Please Look After Mom"

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.