The Waves (Korean Culture Series) -

Kang Shin-Jae

Kegan Paul International

1989

139 páginas

4h 38m

ISBN-13: 9780710302816

Young-sil is a ten-year-old girl in the village of Wonjin during the Japanese occupation. She isn’t terribly likable: her character is described as selfish, sometimes grasping, stubborn, confused and petulant. Her passionate emotions are drawn with fire and ice, nearly bipolar in extremes. The story follows Young-sil and village life for a year, throughout the four seasons. While some of the descriptions of nature and passion are rich and varied, much of the writing is expository, making it hard to keep track of the numerous characters who we are told about rather than experiencing them in a setting. To see this adult world mostly through the child’s eyes gives a distant to emotional impact of the constant and multiple misfortunes that befell this village—all tragically the normal course of village life. The jacket says the author is one of Korea’s most distinguished women writers, winning literary and cultural prizes in 1967 and 1984.