Recitation

An ambitious and difficult novel which challenges the reader to construct a single, coherent story out of a series of fragments in which time, place, characters and narrator are constantly shifting and often only vaguely identified.It begins with a Korean expat couple encountering a woman at a train station in an unidentifiable European city and, learning that she was supposed to meet someone who was going to let her stay in his apartment overnight but hadn’t shown up, invite her to stay with them. They get to talking with her and soon learn that she is Korean (they had started out speaking German and thought she might be Mongolian) and that they are all from Seoul. She – her name is Kyung-hee – reveals that she is a recitation actress and also a traveler. She explains that at some point she learned that her German teacher, whom she parted ways with some years ago and never saw again, had died, and that “after that everything was irresolvably depressing, and neither happiness nor unhappiness could touch her anymore, and so she suddenly decided, though it was impossible, that she needed to go in search of him, she needed to travel.“ (p. 7).The book ends with the same Korean expat couple going to Seoul to learn more about Kyung-hee, and actually managing to find her. She is giving a performance in a small theatre of a dramatic piece called “The Saora Shaman’s wife”, about a woman who sets out to bring her newly dead husband back from the land of the dead. The book ends (almost) with the piece, and it is clear that it describes Kyung-hee’s life in mythic form, she being the shaman’s wife and her lost German teacher being the shaman (or at least one of his incarnations): “He was my eternal husband, my ancestor, my shaman” (p. 272).But there is much more than this to the piece, and very much more to Kyung-hee’s life as related in the course of the book, and there are many more connections to be made between them and the barren worlds they inhabit.Recitation (original Korean title The Low Hills of Seoul) has not gotten much attention in the English-speaking world, but it is a major work of Modern Korean literature and beyond that of world literature. It’s definitely not a book for everybody, but if you’re looking for an intensely challenging reading experience give it a try. 5 stars.

This novel is not centered on anything you would expect—I mean this as a compliment. The world is centered on Asia, and how different Asian cultures interact with each other( what do the Vietnamese think of the Kazakhs? ). The spiritual center is the kind of shamanism prevalent in Mongolia and Siberia, and long ago, the majority religion of the Koreas. The protagonist,too, is not at the center of her pen novel—or her own life.I’m doing a poor job of explaining this, but this book blew my mind. I can not recommend it more highly