Taebaek mountains
Seeing the Korean war though a novel
http://www.hanbooks.com/tamo10set.html
Do you know that many Korean are sorry that they can't translate Korean literature into English then move global readers? Taebaeksanmak, or Taebaek mountains, written by Korean novelist, Mr. Cho Jeongrae, which deals with the stories of revolutionaries around the Korean war, is one of those; it contains a variety of characters and episodes as well as its historic context.
Most of all characters in the books use distinguished dialect of Cheolla province where this novel are dealing with. Because this novel is very long, if you try to read them all, you should spend a lot of time; none the less the novel was one of the super-best sellers in Korea because of its attraction.
You can read the review here,
http://skytreesea.tistory.com/26
I have a chance to read them all in my high school and was fascinated by the novel. I decided to write a review of the book and tried to publish it. One of the trials was to send the review to several journals. Fortunately, a Korean famous author, Kang Jun-man, just published a new journal, titled "Human and thoughts", read my review and allow my review to be published in Human and Thoughts.
I linked the url of the essay in this post; I am sorry that this was not translated in English; it is around 3000 words long.
The point of the review is that I was impressed by the story; that we should not forget the story of revolutionaries, though we won't follow their ideology or determination, because Korean social and economic development is based on their story, directly or indirectly.
A sentence many readers mentioned as insightful was that: the key of this novel is that ideology, whatever it is, should serve for the people. In the story, there are many kinds of people like a socialist, an anarchist, a conservationist, and ordinary people who don't care for what the ideology is. While meeting those characters in the novel was such a great experience for me, but it was not easy to summarize what I feel in reading the book.
For me, while the story was interesting, the lesson the book gave us was not clear. Of course, many novels are not written to give a lesson. In my youth, with an inertia to study and find the lesson from books, I tried my best to think and summarize what I feel reading the book. I liked it because the novel was human story, not about ideologies or international relationship.
Instead of explaining the novel more, I would like to mention one of the most impressiv scenes. At last, Yeom Sang-gu, in front of the death of his brother, a revolutionary, though he had hated his brother throughout his life, told his subordinates to be polite to the dead bodies of revolutionaries including his brother. Throughout the whole story, he was always described as an evil, but in the end we found him a ordinary person in the complex historic context. Like other East Asian people he kept polite to the dead.
Due to this publication, I have good chances to communicate with the people outside for the first time and get a goal to be a writer. Some of the readers gave me letters, not email; it was 1998 when internet was not common. Other than the private experience, the novel itself is of course worth reading; it is interesting and informative.
In the world history, the Korean war is a well-known and important tragedy after the second World war. However, I don't think that the procedure and outcomes of the war is not known to the world people. The war includes not only the conflict between south and north, capitalist and socialist, and US and Soviet, but also Korean and Korean.
To see the war between Northern socialist and Southern capitalist is, I believe, a very narrow perspective. There were also the severe struggle including Southern socialist and Northern capitalist. I believe that if he who read this novel of Tabaeksanmak can understand this post and Korean historic context better.
