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Product Info
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Author: Hwang Sok-Yong
ISBN: 9781583228999
Year: 2009
Format: Hardcover
Historical fiction
The Old Garden
by
Hwang Sok-Yong
The Old Garden by
Hwang Sok-Yong
Reviews
"Hwang Sok-yong is the most committed, politically active writer of all those who have been translated from the Korean in recent years"
Liberation
Summary
Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopianist dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yoon Hee once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, he relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth—a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history.
Hyun Woo weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-yong grapples with the immortal questions—the endurance of love, the price of a commitment to causes—while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life, for the dream of a better tomorrow.