Recent reading V

A little time ago I finished a book I just happened to come across while spending my time in a bookshop at the station, waiting for a train. It was Kyung-Sook Shin's "Please Look After Mom" (in the Swedish translation "Ta hand om min mor").

The entire book circles around the sudden disappearance of the mother of a family where the now grown-up children have moved from their childhood home in the South Korean countryside to Seoul. It is when trying to get on a subway in Seoul while visiting her children the elderly woman is lost, not managing to follow her husband onto the train. The family searches for the woman, their mother, but although reports about sightings of her reach them from different parts of the city, they never find her.

The different parts are written in second person, and directed towards one of the children or the husband (different for each part). In the latter parts it is obviously narrated by the missing mother but this was not clear to me in the first part, and at least in one part the story is written in third person about the eldest brother. Meanwhile the family looks for the woman, the book looks back on the life of the woman and her life together, and sometimes not together, with her husband, as well as the childhood and youths of their children. At the same time it tells the tale about the huge changes in the society South Korea has gone through during only one lifespan

I like the story, although it saddens me reading about the mother and what she has endured, with little reward from her family. And I can't help thinking that the story must exaggerate the extent to which the rest of the family ignored their mother/wife, and how they are later full of regrets. It is not like this in real life, please say it is not? And I find myself not knowing if this is a realistic depiction of another culture - or if it is more a way of describing generalised characters to achieve the effect of guilt and regret. There are other readers who has also reacted - although in a more out-spoken negative way. At least I found one, very long, blogpost about it. And although I agree with some of its arguments, as the main point (I think) about the description of how the family sees the mother in a not so realistic way, I still think the book gives a view of life in South Korea and how it has changed that is quite fascinating to read about.

New York times writes about the book here, DN here and Svenska Dagbladet here.
Swedish blogposts: here and here.