Please Look After Mom

Somehow a novel by the Korean novelist Kyung-Sook Shin had made it onto my list (thanks Mr. Bezos for giving us the useful functionality!), but when I was in the wonderful Circle City Books in Pittsboro whenever I was last there they didn't have a copy of the one I was looking for. There was, however, a copy of Please Look After Mom, Shin's 2012 novel which was a finalist for the Man Asian Literary prize. So I bought it and have been making my way through it over the last couple of weeks.

It's a solid novel. It didn't blow my doors off, but I'm glad I read it. Written from the perspectives of a woman's children, her husband, and her (spoiler alert!) wandering spirit, the novel tells the story of a small-town peasant woman who is separated from her husband and goes missing in Seoul on the way to visit her kids, or maybe to a medical appointment. The novel traces the family's passage in one generation from a hardscrabble rural existence to urbanity. One daughter is a writer, suggesting some autobiographical echoes.

This was the first Korean novel I've ever read and it reminds me to read more, as well as more Japanese ones and ones from elsewhere in the world. I did a good job of pushing myself to do so when I was working on my dissertation many moons ago but have faltered a little over my decades of earning money. Although novels (and the classic narrative movies that have sprung from them) are definitely a Western construct, they do offer us a unique window into how the rest of the world lives and let us reflect on human commonalities, even as the form admittedly elides differences through the imposition of a Western model of consciousness. Such is life. They are better than nothing.