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Reviews
A City of Han: Stories by expat writers in South Korea by Eliot Olesen, Ron Bandun, Ted Snyder
mst3kakalina's review
4.0
I taught English outside of Seoul for two and a half years. I've stumbled across a few mediocre self-published novels by my fellow NESTs and been frustrated that no one seems to be able to write a good one. Bae has moved one step closer towards making my dream of "like a Lost Generation novel, but set in Korea" a reality.
There were a list of traps and pitfalls I had in mind when I went into "A City of Han" (based on what I'd encountered in those mediocre novels) but each and every story dodged them gracefully. It's a slim volume, as other reviewers have noted, but I'm glad that Bae went with quality over quantity. Despite the limited number of titles, we have a wide variety of protagonists in wildly different situations. Even in terms of genre, we have an injection of historical fiction and sci-fi to keep things from being pure (somewhat brutal) realism.
Whether the undercurrent of han will be palpable to anyone who has never lived in or visited Seoul, or anywhere else in Korea, I can't say. But Bae's characterization of the city in her introduction instantly articulated feelings I didn't realize I had -- feelings which I could see reflected at different angles and in different aspects in each story. Even if I think a couple of them could have used a little more polish, maybe another editing pass or two, at their core they had captured that essence Bae describes in her introduction and I understand exactly why she chose them.
There were a list of traps and pitfalls I had in mind when I went into "A City of Han" (based on what I'd encountered in those mediocre novels) but each and every story dodged them gracefully. It's a slim volume, as other reviewers have noted, but I'm glad that Bae went with quality over quantity. Despite the limited number of titles, we have a wide variety of protagonists in wildly different situations. Even in terms of genre, we have an injection of historical fiction and sci-fi to keep things from being pure (somewhat brutal) realism.
Whether the undercurrent of han will be palpable to anyone who has never lived in or visited Seoul, or anywhere else in Korea, I can't say. But Bae's characterization of the city in her introduction instantly articulated feelings I didn't realize I had -- feelings which I could see reflected at different angles and in different aspects in each story. Even if I think a couple of them could have used a little more polish, maybe another editing pass or two, at their core they had captured that essence Bae describes in her introduction and I understand exactly why she chose them.
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