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With eerie discomfort
By Joan Silber |
May 10, 2009, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
CHARACTERS move in a haunted stillness in Paul Yoon's first story collection "Once the Shore." A South Korean island is the setting and residents either have jobs in modern tourism - waiter, hotel manager, gift-store owner - or persist in the traditional work of fishing, farming and diving.
For better and worse they lead lives of restraint and patience.
A girl made unmarriageable by a limp (the result of a childhood stumble with her drunken father) explains her homebound life: "We keep each other company. We do our best."
War and the attractions of a seaside resort bring visitors with their own disturbances and demands; one of the best stories, set in 1947, involves an AWOL American soldier hiding in a village while another features a veteran's widow from upstate New York re-evaluating half-truths.
Yoon's prose is spare and beautiful. He can describe the sea more ways than seem possible without losing freshness and his characters' world is often quietly dazzling. Here's a group of farmers seeing a couple climb a forested hill: "They followed the paleness of two shirts like candle flames moving along that rise of land. They watched as one would watch a flock of geese."
Yoon's landscape often verges on the elemental. A woman whose young husband was conscripted into the Japanese military remembers: "They came for him riding horses ...
"They kicked her down and she hit her head against the base of a tree. Briefly she lost consciousness. When she woke, her eyes focused on the animals and their soft sighs, their white breaths. Hooves lifting, stamping the ground. Tremendous eyes. As if they had come from myth."
The woman who recalls this is a "sea woman," a 66-year-old who has spent all her life diving into the water with a knife and a "cage tied with rope across her back" to bring back seafood to sell.
She has a friendship with the lonely son of Japanese immigrants who's lost an arm in a shark attack and their bonds and small conflicts resonate in images of survival that resemble the connecting of a poem as much as the unfolding of a story. Yoon's narratives face the interesting challenge of relying on characters who don't exactly believe in action.
The sea woman, contemplating why she never remarried after the war, simply thinks, "a life was formed and she took it."
While a number of people here are tormented by longing, their yearnings result more in frustrated gestures than in actual drama.
Yet the beauty of these stories is precisely in their reserve: they are mild and stark at the same time. By mild I do not mean cozy. Harshness is always close at hand here, and no one is surprised by betrayals, thefts, brutal mistakes of war. "Once the Shore" is the work of a large and quiet talent.
For better and worse they lead lives of restraint and patience.
A girl made unmarriageable by a limp (the result of a childhood stumble with her drunken father) explains her homebound life: "We keep each other company. We do our best."
War and the attractions of a seaside resort bring visitors with their own disturbances and demands; one of the best stories, set in 1947, involves an AWOL American soldier hiding in a village while another features a veteran's widow from upstate New York re-evaluating half-truths.
Yoon's prose is spare and beautiful. He can describe the sea more ways than seem possible without losing freshness and his characters' world is often quietly dazzling. Here's a group of farmers seeing a couple climb a forested hill: "They followed the paleness of two shirts like candle flames moving along that rise of land. They watched as one would watch a flock of geese."
Yoon's landscape often verges on the elemental. A woman whose young husband was conscripted into the Japanese military remembers: "They came for him riding horses ...
"They kicked her down and she hit her head against the base of a tree. Briefly she lost consciousness. When she woke, her eyes focused on the animals and their soft sighs, their white breaths. Hooves lifting, stamping the ground. Tremendous eyes. As if they had come from myth."
The woman who recalls this is a "sea woman," a 66-year-old who has spent all her life diving into the water with a knife and a "cage tied with rope across her back" to bring back seafood to sell.
She has a friendship with the lonely son of Japanese immigrants who's lost an arm in a shark attack and their bonds and small conflicts resonate in images of survival that resemble the connecting of a poem as much as the unfolding of a story. Yoon's narratives face the interesting challenge of relying on characters who don't exactly believe in action.
The sea woman, contemplating why she never remarried after the war, simply thinks, "a life was formed and she took it."
While a number of people here are tormented by longing, their yearnings result more in frustrated gestures than in actual drama.
Yet the beauty of these stories is precisely in their reserve: they are mild and stark at the same time. By mild I do not mean cozy. Harshness is always close at hand here, and no one is surprised by betrayals, thefts, brutal mistakes of war. "Once the Shore" is the work of a large and quiet talent.
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