Things Beautiful in This World
Author: Park Wan-seo
Publisher: Maum Sanchaek
Hardcover | 288 pages | 188*128mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
Master novelist's writings published
posthumously
A delightful discovery by her daughter ¡ª a stack of writing by the late
author Park Wan-suh that was not published ¡ª has materialized into an
emotive book, ¡°Things Beautiful in This World.¡±
The late author¡¯s first daughter found the essays which were written
after 2000. Among them, 38 were gathered for this book. The renowned
novelist whose numerous works include ¡°The Naked Tree,¡± ¡°That Year the
Winter was Warm,¡± ¡°Are you Still Dreaming?¡± passed away in 2011 from
cancer.
Park¡¯s words have always been powerful. In one essay titled ¡°My
Experience, My Literature,¡± she writes how ¡°a good sentence resuscitates
the downtrodden senses¡± and that¡¯s one of the reasons that she spent
days to write one right word.
This was the compilation of a question and answer session that the
author held in 2009 to mark the first anniversary of the death of
another renowned author Park Kyung-ni (¡°Land.¡±) In an essay titled ¡°A
Cute Grandmother,¡± the author wrote about a 70-something friend who
overcame disappointment in her daughter-in-law by reading the first
¡°Harry Potter¡± book in a week with the help of an English-Korean
dictionary.
She writes about her ¡°fights¡± with the stray cats in her neighborhood of
Guri, east of Seoul. On a personal note, this reporter remembers
visiting her Guri home in late 1990s for interviews with women authors
in Korea. She readily opened the doors to her house, hesitating just a
bit when this reporter attempted to get a better glimpse of her room
with its Korean mattress and Korean table.
The interview with her was sense-awakening, as she spoke clearly and
forcefully. Behind the clarity and strength was warmth that was based on
a realistic understanding of the dark as well as the sunny side of human
nature.
Born in 1931 in Gaepung, Gyeonggi Province that was later integrated
into North Korea after the Korean War (1950-1953), she mentioned in
numerous writings that her life before, during and after the war was one
of the darkest moments where she witnessed how people¡¯s lives hung in
balance between communism and the free south even in the span of a day.
She also suffered an enormous tragedy of losing both her husband and her
only son in 1988. In one of her essays titled ¡°Time Must Be God,¡± she
shares how with the passage of time nothing, even the biggest tragedies,
remains forever irreparable.
As most of the pieces were done after 2000, the author tackles the
issues of aging and death. In an eponymous essay, Park recalls how her
once robust painter friend suffered in her last days from cancer and saw
her smile brightly for the first time just six days before her death at
the bare foot of her grandson peeking out from a blanket. ¡°If an old
tree at the last of its days can see a chubby new life near its root,
how happy that old tree would be even as it falls.¡±
--Ji-soo Kim
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