Shadows of a Sound - Hardcover

Hwang, Sun-won

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0916515656 ISBN 13: 9780916515652

Publisher: Mercury House, 1989

Synopsis

Tells the stories of peasant farmers, soldiers, ghetto dwellers, and villagers living in modern Korea

About this title

Language Notes

Text: English, Korean (translation)

From Library Journal

The literature of Korea, unlike that of China and Japan, is still little known in the West, where translations of Korean literature are few and not widely available. Now, with the publication of these books, readers can become acquainted with two important contemporary Korean writers. Hwang, an award-winning author of fiction and poetry, has been writing short stories steadily for half a century. His collection is a representative selection of 27 stories dating from 1937 to 1983. Serviceably translated, these stories portray in sharp detail the harsh lives of the common people during a period of great political instability. Some have the earthy directness of folktales; others reach to address larger themes. All are tinged with a melancholy lyricism. Hwang has a particular affinity for the outcasts of society, and loneliness is the recurrent motif in these vividly evoked tales. Silver Stallion is the second novel by writer and translator Junghyo, whose White Badge , released earlier this year, was the first novel by a Korean to be published "commercially" in the United States. Set during the outbreak of the Korean War, it is the story of the effect of a U.N. Forces encampment on an impoverished village as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants. The novel centers on a young boy and his widowed mother, who is raped by a marauding pair of American soldiers. Weary of struggling to feed her two young children, and ostracized by the other villagers, she becomes a prostitute who entertains the "bengkos" (Yankees) in exchange for K-rations. To the villagers, the strange-looking bengkos represent a world far wealthier yet more barbaric than their own, and their incursion has tragic consequences, particularly for the children. Like Hwang, Junghyo has an eye for the gritty and pungent detail, and he has succeeded in translating his novel into an assured, idiomatic English.
- Christine Stenstrom, New York Law Sch . Lib .
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mercury House
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0916515656
• ISBN 13: 9780916515652
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208
• Editor: Holman J. Martin