Please Look After Mom (Vintage)
3 journalers for this copy...
MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE WINNER
When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom?
Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.
When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom?
Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.
rabck!
Thanks for sending it my way :)
I enjoyed this book up to the point of learning many things about another culture and the small things of a daily life. The end didn't surprise me much, I would say that I was waiting for something else, but overall it was a good reading.
The book is travelling to Delphi as part of my September offer (One book a month)! Enjoy reading it! :)
The book is travelling to Delphi as part of my September offer (One book a month)! Enjoy reading it! :)
A book dealing with family relationships and largely dominated by emotion. How often do we take our own people for granted, how often do we take for granted the image we have for our own people, how we feel that they will always be there and often leave things untold that we would like to say to them sometime but we never tell them or how we may hurt them without really meaning it or realising what we do...
The family's mother goes missing among the crowd in Seoul's station when the train wagon leaves with her husband on but without her ... Since then her family is looking for her ...
Throughout the book we follow the thoughts of the oldest daughter, the eldest son, the husband, the woman herself, and in the epilogue again the eldest daughter's view. That way we watch the events from the moment the mom disappears but also the feelings and memories of each family member, flash-backs in the past and the history of the family and the bonds among them. In the meantime the book is quite revealing about life in South Korea for a Western reader .
In parts of the book the writing style feels a bit weird because the author uses mainly the second singular person's grammar, either literally or often as we use it in Greek, referring to ourselves or to others, but I believe rarely using it this way in English. It's not always obvious who the narrator is , while on my opinion the weaker chapters are exactly those that naturally were the most difficult to write: That of the mother and the epilogue.
All that said, it is definitely a very interesting and moving book, worthing to be read.
The family's mother goes missing among the crowd in Seoul's station when the train wagon leaves with her husband on but without her ... Since then her family is looking for her ...
Throughout the book we follow the thoughts of the oldest daughter, the eldest son, the husband, the woman herself, and in the epilogue again the eldest daughter's view. That way we watch the events from the moment the mom disappears but also the feelings and memories of each family member, flash-backs in the past and the history of the family and the bonds among them. In the meantime the book is quite revealing about life in South Korea for a Western reader .
In parts of the book the writing style feels a bit weird because the author uses mainly the second singular person's grammar, either literally or often as we use it in Greek, referring to ourselves or to others, but I believe rarely using it this way in English. It's not always obvious who the narrator is , while on my opinion the weaker chapters are exactly those that naturally were the most difficult to write: That of the mother and the epilogue.
All that said, it is definitely a very interesting and moving book, worthing to be read.
Journal Entry 7 by Delphi_Reader at Μακρυγιάννη / Makrygianni area in Athens - Αθήνα, Attica Greece on Friday, January 11, 2019