![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Challenged by the second person narrative, we move from deep immersion in the South Korean world of the novel and find ourselves contemplating our own situation. We start thinking about the way we treat our own mothers. Then something strange happens, or at least it happened to me. ![]() How can Mother have gone missing from Seoul station? How can we have neglected her needs? How are we going to get her back? Like the family about whom Kyung-Sook Shin writes so beau tifully, we feel confused, guilty and desperate. Rather than being comfortably in control of the book, we find ourselves struggling to make sense of the situation. What is the effect of this unusual approach? In a word: bewilderment. You, the reader, are drawn into the crisis whether you like it or not. But protests are in vain because this is the rarest of books: a second person narrative. This is how Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please Look After Mother starts and immediately the protests begin. You decide to make flyers and hand them out where Mother was last seen. The family is gathered at your eldest brother Hyong-chol’s house, bouncing ideas off each other. It’s been one week since Mother went missing. ![]()
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