The Guest / Edition 1

by Hwang Sok-yong, Kyung-Ja Chun, Maya West

Overview

Based on actual events, The Guest is a profound portrait of a divided people haunted by a painful past, and a generation's search for reconciliation.
During the Korean War, Hwanghae Province in North Korea was the setting of a gruesome fifty-two day massacre. In an act of collective amnesia the atrocities were attributed to American military, but in truth they resulted from malicious battling between Christian and Communist Koreans. Forty years later, Ryu Yosop, a minister living in America returns to his home village, where his older brother once played a notorious role in the bloodshed. Besieged by vivid memories and visited by the troubled spirits of the deceased, Yosop must face the survivors of the tragedy and lay his brother's soul to rest.
Faulkner-like in its intense interweaving narratives, The Guest is a daring and ambitious novel from a major figure in world literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583227510
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	10/07/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	730,513
Product dimensions:	5.97(w) x 8.96(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

HWANG SOK-YONG is one of the contemporary masters of Korean literature. His work, which grapples with the troubled history of his divided country, has resulted in his imprisonment, his exile, and the rare achievement of a wide international readership. Hwang’s novels in English includeThe Old Garden, a tragic love story set against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War and South Korea's political revolution of the eighties; The Guest, based on the true account of a violent clash between Communist and Christian neighbors in a Korean village town; and The Shadow of Arms, inspired by his experience as a Korean soldier in the Vietnam War. Some of his recent bestsellers in Korea, where Hwang is among that country’s most popular writers, includeBaridegi (Princess Bari) and Gaebapbaragibyeol (The Evening Star), a coming of age novel that Hwang wrote as a blog.

Editorial Reviews

"Vivid snapshots from the Korean War and surreal encounters with ghosts intersect in the first major US release by award-winning Korean novelist Sok-yong … an ambitious exploration of a postwar survivor's chaotic psyche." —Publishers Weekly

"Expert, idiomatic translation renders visible a story that helps explain the present weirdness in North Korea … [T]he story with its great insight into the region, is deeply rewarding." —Kirkus Reviews

"Hwang Sok-Yong is the most committed, politically active writer of all those who have translated the Korean in recent years." —Liberation

"Writing that refuses to ignore suffering, but at the same time refuses to let itself be destroyed by destruction—which is a great challenge to any author." —Le Figaro Litteraire

"A provocative novel … with a subtle power. [Hwang] takes the reader to the edge of a gruesome scene, then steps back and focuses on the sort of mundane detail that sticks in one's mind more firmly than any blood-splattered image." —TimeASIA

From the Publisher

Vivid snapshots from the Korean War and surreal encounters with ghosts intersect in this first major U.S. release by award-winning Korean novelist Sok-Yong. The result-threaded with gritty religious and political undertones-is an ambitious exploration of a postwar survivor's chaotic psyche. Rev. Ryu Yosop, an elderly minister living in New Jersey, is stalked by memories of the horrific 52-day massacre he witnessed 40 years ago in North Korea's Hwanghae Province, where his older brother Yohan played a leading role in the carnage. To confront his past, Yosop returns to his hometown of Ch'ansaemgol for the first time since he immigrated to America 20 years earlier. Drifting between the past and the present, among the living and the dead, Yosop yearns to appease and exorcise the spirits that haunt him. Yosop's struggle becomes truly gripping as he reunites with long-lost family members in North Korea. Chaperoned by Communist Party members who resolutely blame past atrocities on the American military, Yosop remembers all too well that it was his own Christian and Communist neighbors who committed the bloodshed. Though the time-traveling prose takes some getting used to, Sok-Yong eloquently chronicles Yosop's odyssey through guilt, fear, faith and forgiveness. Author tour. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Expert, idiomatic translation renders visible a story that helps explain the present weirdness in North Korea. Full marks to translators Chun and West for deft work with Hwang's excellent depiction of the vicious, nearly lunatic clash between Christians and communists in the period between the end of World War II, when the Japanese colonial masters were ousted, and the Korean War. Ryu Yosop is a Presbyterian minister in New York who, like his older brother Yohan, emigrated from Korea to America. Yohan, also a church officer, has been living alone, his sons off in western states, his wife dead. When Yohan himself dies, days after a prickly meeting with his younger brother, and just before a long-planned trip back to their ancestral village, Yosop makes the trip instead, taking with him some of Yohan's cremated remains. Yosop does not travel alone. He is accompanied by his brother's ghost and the ghost of a servant, representing sides in the horrifying battle for control of the country half a century ago. Hwang coolly presents the chaotic reality of the post-war period, revealing a story much different from that presented by the modern-day totalitarian government. A museum of horrors supposedly visited on a village by Americans, for example, is discovered to have been perpetrated by others. Further truths are exposed as Yosop is taken to meet the wife and son Yohan abandoned when he fled the country. Requires patient reading, but the story, with its great insight into the region, is deeply rewarding.

Kirkus Reviews