5 Books Recommendations to Get Started With Korean Literature

whenever people ask me where to get started with Korean literature I often find myself recommending

the same titles over and over again so here are five titles that I think are great starting

points if you want to delve into Korean literature the first book Is please look after Mom by Shin

Kyung-sook translated by Kim Chi-young it follows what happens when an elderly woman is separated

from her husband in a soul subway station and gets lost the family desperately tries to find

her and as they do they think about their own relationships with her the perspective shifts from

the eldest daughter the eldest son the husband and the mother herself one thing that I really love

about this novel is that it's almost entirely in the second person narrative and it works so well

there's so much intimacy and intensity in this novel because of that it's like were directly

being spoken to and many people have said that this novel felt like a nudge to reflect on you

know their own relationships with their mothers on the surface this book is about everything

that mothers do their sacrifice their love that is often taken for granted uh but the one thing that

really fascinated me was this idea of chameleonic identity of mothers where the mother basically is

forced to fit whatever perspective frame that each person has of her whether as a mother or a wife or

simply a woman and depending on each perspective the mother's true identity who she truly is

becomes lost and unknown to the person seeing her it's also why the second person narrative works so

well because it portrays the tunnel vision we have on our mothers and it makes the realization that a

mother is a whole person that she's not just the mother much more impactful so it is obvious why

this book won the Man Asian Literary prize in 201 honestly this was one of the first breakout novels

from Korea so this is a must next we have the vegetarian by hang translated by Deborah Smith

it won the International Booker prize in 2016 the story starts off with this woman deciding to be a

vegetarian and soon an intense and surreal family drama erupts from all sides as a fan of Haruki

Murakami and surrealism in general this book was a treat to me I highly recommend it to anyone who's

looking for something weird to read there's a bit of sexual violence in this as well so there's sure

warning but overall it is a fantastic work that delves into the themes of Desire identity societal

repression and more my favorite thing about the vegetarian is that it looks at the idea of how

people deal with the inexplicable not everything in the world is something that is within our

control or is something that can be explained away logically in the book The main character

is irrationally vegetarian and the family members try to figure out what's happening with her they

all react to it in different ways one tries to run from it another tries to endure it another

tries to exploit it and at the same time it is a very effective critique at Social pressures

because how do we deal with people who seem to go against the conventionally established norms

and the perspective that hang offers is weird but very poignant Han Kang is a must-read author when

it comes to Korean literature and this book is a great introduction to her writing style and

themes the third book is Almond by Sohn Won-pyung translated by Sandy Joosun Lee the book is about

Yunjae a teenager with a condition of having an abnormally small amygdala which makes him unable

to feel emotions like fear or anger a condition otherwise known as Alexia just as an added context

the amygdala is almond shaped it's also Latin for almond as many medical terms are Latin based hence

the title almond almond starts off with a tragedy Yunjae's mother and grandmother become victims of