As KTLIT tweeted yesterday (yes, you can follow KTLIT on twitter at @KTLIT):
“Park Wan-suh’s Lonesome You in @ltikorea /Dalkey Archive collection to publish November, is immediately the best selection of her work!”
And it is true, partly because Lonesome You is the most complete volume of Park Wan-suh’s (the way she chose to Romanize her name) work, particularly her second phase.
The title is no accident, as many of these works are about loneliness of one kind or another. In fact the theme of Park’s work is almost always alienation of some kind, either physical, psychological, economic, or political. Further, Park’s work on alienation breaks down into two major categories. First, Park wrote about families, normally centering on a daughter and mother, trying to survive the Korean Civil War and its aftermath. Second, Park wrote about the abysmal (as she saw it) situation that women, often middle-class or thereabouts, lived in once the “miracle” on the Han was being engineered, and then coming true. In most cases, the stories are of family relationships in which alienation can be starkly outlined. All of the stories in this volume focus on families, and several of the stories here reveal an ironic sense of humor that is not always present in Park’s previous translated works.
Click here to read the article at Korean Literature in Translation
