The Guest

August 29, 2005
Vivid snapshots from the Korean War and surreal encounters with ghosts intersect in this first major U.S. release by award-winning Korean novelist Sok-Yong. The result—threaded with gritty religious and political undertones—is an ambitious exploration of a postwar survivor's chaotic psyche. Rev. Ryu Yosop, an elderly minister living in New Jersey, is stalked by memories of the horrific 52-day massacre he witnessed 40 years ago in North Korea's Hwanghae Province, where his older brother Yohan played a leading role in the carnage. To confront his past, Yosop returns to his hometown of Ch'ansaemgol for the first time since he immigrated to America 20 years earlier. Drifting between the past and the present, among the living and the dead, Yosop yearns to appease and exorcise the spirits that haunt him. Yosop's struggle becomes truly gripping as he reunites with long-lost family members in North Korea. Chaperoned by Communist Party members who resolutely blame past atrocities on the American military, Yosop remembers all too well that it was his own Christian and Communist neighbors who committed the bloodshed. Though the time-traveling prose takes some getting used to, Sok-Yong eloquently chronicles Yosop's odyssey through guilt, fear, faith and forgiveness. Author tour.

October 15, 2005
One of Korea's foremost writers presents a moving family saga juxtaposed against the horrors of the Korean War. Barely a week after Ryu Yosop's brother, Yohan, dies in New Jersey, Yosop leaves his Brooklyn home to travel to North Korea's Hwanghae Province, where they both grew up. Their village was the setting of a massacre over 40 years earlier, gruesome killings at first attributed to the American military but which in reality resulted from the violent conflict between Christian and communist Koreans. Upon his return, Yosup is visited by the spirits of family members, murdered villagers, and those who participated in the killings. He learns that his brother, Yohan, actively took part in the massacre--torturing and killing at least 10 people in their own village. Hwang has brilliantly crafted a novel that serves as an exorcism that allows the dead and the living to share, in alternating voices, their stories and memories. By combining lyrical prose with painful subject matter--atrocities committed in the name of ideological superiority--Hwang achieves stunning results.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)