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L'empire Des Lumières (2006)

by Young-Ha Kim(Favorite Author)

3.51 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

2809700796 (ISBN13: 9782809700794)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Philippe Picquier

review 1: I meant to go to sleep one night a few days ago after reading for twenty minutes and I ended up reading for five hours. I finished the rest today. The book is called Your Republic Is Calling You. It’s about a North Korean spy who has lived in Seoul for 20 years. He has not received a new order in ten years. He logs into his email at work and gets a mysterious phone call, asking that he checks a specific junk email. He follows the page and receives an order, that he must get back to Pyongyang at dawn.He doesn’t know whether the command is real or not. He doesn’t know why they are calling him back now, after he was seemingly forgotten for a decade. He doesn’t know if he leaked something unconsciously, and they’re calling him back to be executed, or if the South has... more found out about his identity, and he needs to come back for his own protection…and that of his South Korean wife and child, who life with him, unknowing of where he was truly raised.The book takes place within one day, following this past-his-prime spy as he tries to unravel why he is being called back. The book also follows the sordid lives of his daughter, his wife, and a mysterious man who is watching on the whole time.Young-Ka Kim and the translator did an excellent job with the language, as the sparse yet eloquent prose so common in the extremely talented Asian novelists is in full force here. Though dialogue is idealistic and the character’s have a few too many profound thoughts, the writing is so damned interesting you’re never taken out of it.It was also fun reading a thriller that took place in my old neighborhood in Seoul. It really made me feel like I was back there, reading about Coex mall and Gangnam station.What was refreshing about the book was how the author didn’t come down too hard on North Korea. Certainly, you can’t hide the facts, but it takes me right out of the story when a character who grows up in a militaristic communist country is for some reason not partial to it at all, and the book is used as a soapbox. While Young-Ka Kim’s elderly spy enjoys the finer things in South Korean life he begins to notice how different he’s become in a capitalist society, and his deliberations about his two lives, in two completely different environments, are truly fascinating.I love reading because when you watch a movie about a serial killer, you’re just sitting there, watching what he does, going, “how cold is this person” or “what could they be thinking?” A good writer has to actually take you into the mind of their characters, and portray their thought processes. It can alter your thinking and state by presenting a new form of reality, as seen through another human.I read a book once about a derelict kid snaps and kills his mother one day. The actual murder was a boring part of the book, whereas in the movie it would have been the main event. What was so fascinating in the novel was how the killer viewed the day after he committed his worst act. He walks the streets of Tokyo in a trance, amazed he is even able to ride his bike, buy noodles, or do anything a normal person could do. He feels exempt from the world’s duties because he is such a monster, he feels like he is defeating the world for every minute he’s not put down for his crime.Young-Ka Kim picked a special perspective for his main protagonist. Not only is he a man living out his last day on some alien planet he invaded 20 years ago, but he is comparing the two cultures he grew up in.I love books like this. At one point the spy asks a friend of his whether she likes honey. She says yeah, it’s okay. It’s not her favorite, but she finds nothing wrong with it. He then thinks about his home, where a woman when she gives birth to a child will get one glass of honey water, and be grateful for it the rest of her life.You look at everything differently after reading into a man like that.His wife has also gone awry because of her husband’s lack of emotion. Unknown to her, growing up in North Korea, he was taught to constantly criticize himself. In his training to be a spy, he was taught to be a barely noticeable pleaser, someone who never speaks up, and someone who will never be noticed. His objective was to blend in, and nothing more.
review 2: I read this book because I'll be on a writer's festival with the author. It's my first time reading about modern Korea and I was impressed how wonderfully the book highlighted both modern South Korean angst as well as the backstory about North Korea.About one day in the life of a North Korean spy who's gets activated after a long winter, the story highlights the conflicted feelings of someone who's grown at home in hostile territory and comfortable with his other persona, but must now confront the fact his loyalties have already been pledged to another place.The spy's dilemma is real. Can he, should he, leave his daughter and his wife? But, this is no long-faced melancholic drama. Part of the charm and irony of the pieces is the many tragi-comic almost Chaplinesque scenes, underlining the gritty realities of life even in paradisiacal South Korea. I've seen Kim speaking on youtube. He is animated and ironically funny. I can sense some of this in the book, but my feeling is something was lost in translation.I've a feeling I would've given this book 5 stars if I'd read it in the original Korean. less

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