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When I started reading Korean novels seriously, I started reading Kim Young-ha \u2014 going on, in fact, to produce a profile of his work right here in the LARB<\/em><\/a>. The world of modern Korean letters has produced few hits in translation, much less in translation into English, where Shin Kyung-sook\u2019s Oprah-anointed Please Look After Mom<\/em> (despite Shin\u2019s recent and confusing plagiarism scandal or maybe non-scandal<\/a>) remains the Korean novel to beat in the Anglosphere. But were I a betting man, I\u2019d put money on Kim as the next big thing in global Korean literature; unlike most of his colleagues, he already has a deliberately international outlook, not to mention three novels available in English with major publishers: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself <\/em>(\ub098\ub294 \ub098\ub97c \ud30c\uad34\ud560 \uad8c\ub9ac\uac00 \uc788\ub2e4), Your Republic Is Calling You <\/em>(\ube5b\uc758 \uc81c\uad6d), and Black Flower <\/em>(\uac80\uc740 \uaf43), all of which draw on Korean culture as well as literature\u2019s more placeless powers to make their impacts.<\/p>\n
The prospect of reading Kim\u2019s other books in the original has provided more than its share of motivation for me to get a handle on the Korean language. And I don\u2019t just mean his novels, though I do relish the opportunity to read his currently-under-translation I Can Hear Your Voice<\/em> (\ub108\uc758 \ubaa9\uc18c\ub9ac\uac00 \ub4e4\ub824) before it comes out in English next year and Diary of a Murderer<\/em> (\uc0b4\uc778\uc790\uc758 \uae30\uc5b5\ubc95) before it does some time in the far-flung, not-firmly-scheduled future. I mean his collections of essays, a favorite form of mine but one which barely any publishers bother bringing into English, even though they can make big splashes in their writers\u2019 home countries. It just recently happened with Kim\u2019s Read<\/em> (\uc77d\ub2e4) which completes a trilogy of slim nonfiction books that started with See<\/em> (\ubcf4\ub2e4), which rounded up his columns written for a film magazine, and Speak<\/em> (\ub9d0\ud558\ub2e4), a collection of his talks and interviews.<\/p>\n
With the success of See <\/em>and Speak<\/em>, Kim seemed to have tapped into a demand for not just the fruits of his imagination but his observations on storytelling culture as well. This justified spending the time and effort to make Read<\/em> not out of previous writings, but all new material: a series of six lectures, which he delivered live, one per fortnight, in the run-up to the book\u2019s release. In them, he talks about the classics, what about the stories told in the classics have allowed them to endure, what the classics have technically and thematically in common with modern stories told today on the page as well as the screen, and why one might want to read the classics at all. The result references and analyzes everything from The Odyssey<\/em> to Collateral<\/em>,Don Quixote <\/em>to The Big Bang Theory<\/em>, Crime and Punishment<\/em> toNorwegian Wood<\/em>, The Stranger<\/em> to The Sopranos<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n