Friday, April 27, 2012
Please Look After Mother
With this string of curious occurrences, I'm really glad I have my friends to keep me sane :-) Like Fibi Lou, Theo, Sheryl, Zeikei, Zexun, Eielson! It's quite frustrating though to have things like these mess up my mind and bog me down like argh noooo not when I'm FINALLY in a good state of mind after months of having a depressed/angsty/damaged psyche!!!!! All I can do is stay positive :/
At present I am a chapter and half into Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mother and so far it's been a very pleasant read. However, since it was originally written in Korean, this reader suspects that a huge fraction of the beauty of the original text has been lost amidst the process of translation. :/ The prose, simple and elementary, makes for easy reading without falling under the ranks of stifling and mundane. Shin manages to piece together the story by weaving together – and through – fragments of the past and present, each juxtapose peppered with rhetorical questions, artfully crafting a fluid, engaging tale.
Also noteworthy and particularly interesting is Shin's use of the second-person as her chosen narrative mode. It gives the novel the feel of an RPG game hahaha which I think is quite cool.
The end of the first chapter was particularly striking:
He tells you that since he was a child he has only been able to wear cotton, because of various allergies. When other fabrics touched his skin, he became itchy and got a rash. He grew up wearing only the cotton clothes his mother made. In his memories, his mother was always sewing. She would have had to sew and sew to make everything personally, from his underwear to his socks.
He says that when he opened her cupboard after she passed away he found stacks of cotton clothes that would last him for the rest of his life. That his outfit today is one he found in that cupboard. What did his mother look like? Your heart aches as you listen to him. You ask the man who is remembering his beloved mother, 'Do you think your mother was happy?'
His words are polite, but his expression tells you that you've insulted his mother: 'My mother was different from today's women.'
Please Look After Mother
— Kyung-Sook Shin
Most people of today are definitely not as strong and selfless as people of the past.
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