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Tag Archives: telling vs showing

Korean Saga: Beasts of a Little Land

16 Monday May 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, brutalities, controlled emotions, crossed paths, distant storytelling, historical fiction, Japanese rule, Juhea Kim, Korea, oppression, saga, stereotypes, telling vs showing, twentieth century, utilitarian viewpoint

Review: Beasts of a Little Land, by Juhea Kim
Ecco, 2021. 399 pp. $27

In 1917, seven years into the Japanese occupation of Korea, a hunter tracks a tiger because its skin is worth a small fortune, and he hopes to save his starving family from death. But he nearly perishes in the snow during the hunt, and again when he runs into a party of Japanese officers intent on bagging a trophy, any trophy. However, when he saves one officer from the tiger — without killing the beast or even holding a weapon — the officer spares his life.

Meanwhile, a woman sells her eleven-year-old daughter, Jade, to a high-class courtesan, who accepts the girl despite her unprepossessing looks and character.

From these two events, whose aftereffects play out over decades, comes a saga about wealth and poverty, freedom and depression, and, perhaps most important, the ability (or lack thereof) to see beneath surfaces or deal with emotional vulnerability — indeed, any emotions at all. Along the way, the novel mirrors the story of Korean independence, emphasizing the twenty years between the tiger hunt and Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1937, though the narrative continues to 1965.

Japanese poster or postcard, artist unknown, from the 1930s, which reads, “Japan-Korea. Teamwork and Unity. Champions of the World” (courtesy http://populargusts.blogspot.de/2010/07/ reunification-assimilation-and-three.html, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Besides Jade, her mentor, and the two courtesans-in-training among whom she grows up, there’s an orphan boy who lives in the street, whom Jade befriends, and a couple of businessmen and a writer-turned-politician. Jade crosses paths, and sometimes more, with all of them. Each represents a particular emotional type, whether the violent man who expresses himself through his fists, the blueblood conscious of his rank and importance, and so forth.

I’m not the first critic to point out that Kim’s Japanese officers summon up a stereotype. They’re practically stick figures whose stunted limbs consist of greed, sadism, the conception of honor (read: pride), and utter incomprehension of human feeling. On the surface, they’re almost out of the wartime propaganda film. But Kim has two goals, I think, which grant the portrait a purpose.

First, she’s writing for an audience that might have heard of the atrocities in Nanjing in 1937 and maybe the so-called comfort women conscripted for military brothels, but for whom Japanese brutalities in Asia are largely a blank — and her story begins decades before them, anyway.

Second, the officers’ incapacity to view people, places, or objects from any perspective other than utilitarian extends to many of the Korean characters too, especially the men. But several women buy into this philosophy as well, assuming that once they lose their looks — in their thirties! — they’ve nothing left, and their lives are over. In that way, the Japanese officers’ fatal flaw, lack of heart, is on the same continuum as everyone else’s. As a result, few characters in this novel are happy or even know what that might look like, except possibly in retrospect.

The narrative worldview may take getting used to; so does the prose style. At first, the author’s manner of explaining everything — landscape, actions, feelings — struck me wrong. I admire her writing for its simple elegance, certain passages of which are beautiful without calling attention to themselves, so I wondered why she told everything rather than show it. But I stuck with it, and I think I see what she’s after, a panoramic discourse akin to Tolstoy or, as with the opening scenes depicting the tiger hunt, a legend. See what you make of this typical passage, which parses the thoughts of SungSoo, a businessman, on finding a former lover talking to a onetime friend whom he looks down on, as news of the emperor’s death has reached them:

Once the soju [liquor] had circulated through their bodies, each began to feel more comfortable — not about the emperor’s death, but the situation among themselves. It is always excruciating to discover that one’s distinct connections, who ought to belong firmly and chastely in separate spheres of one’s life, are somehow acquainted, and perhaps more intimately than one would like. Each of them keenly suffered from this, though SungSoo in particular took this as an insult and a betrayal. His good breeding and the soothing effects of soju were the only things that kept him from succumbing to the jealousy that burned deeply in his chest.

You may like this style, or it may feel distant, but if you read Beasts of a Little Land, get used to it. As with many sagas (not my usual fare), the attempt to make everything larger than life can seem stilted, especially when the crossing of paths feels contrived, or scenes unfold according to a predictable pattern. I wish too that Kim or her editor had weeded out phrases like blow off, reach out to, okay with, and playbook, when we’re supposed to be reading about early twentieth-century Korea.

But taken in its entirety, Beasts of a Little Land has something going for it, not least history that may be unfamiliar.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Telling Too Much: The Hamilton Affair

26 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Alexander Hamilton, book review, commercial fiction, correcting historical record, eighteenth century, Elizabeth Cobbs, Elizabeth Schuyler, historical fiction, honor, information dumps, Revolutionary War, rivalry, telling vs showing

Review: The Hamilton Affair, by Elizabeth Cobbs
Arcade, 2016. 403 pp. $26

He’s illegitimate, an orphan born to poverty in St. Croix; she’s the daughter of one of upstate New York’s first families. He, though a devoted family man who yearns for the warm, close-knit hearth he never had, loves nothing more than a fight, whether on a battlefield or in a political assembly. She, though she picks up the pieces — her lot as a woman — resents her husband’s role as a lightning rod and correctly predicts that they’ll suffer for it.

This is the romance between Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler, and a tragic, touching tale it is. Cobbs begins the narrative with each protagonist as a child. Alexander struggles against the shame of his birth, and you don’t need to be told (though Cobbs does) that he’ll grow up touchy about his honor, in an era when the concept already has a rigid, constraining definition.

James Sharples’s pastel portrait of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, 1795 (courtesy Smithsonian Institution, via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, Eliza feels like the odd one out too, awkward, unschooled, incapable of knowing what to say or how to act. An early passage recounts her visit with her father to a conclave of the Six Nations:

The shadowy interior smelled of wood smoke and roasting meat. Shelves burdened with gourds and lidded baskets lined the walls, and ears of drying maize tied by their silks hung from the rafters. Groups of men lounged on rugs, some made from bearskin, others from cloth. The translator showed them to a bench facing a low table made from a single plank. Thank goodness, Eliza thought, since she hadn’t the faintest idea how to sit on a bearskin with the dignity she knew her father expected.

The description reveals a major strength of The Hamilton Affair. Cobbs, a noted historian, renders the scenery, sensations of everyday life, mores, and issues in vivid, economical prose. You can see, for example, how the North-South divide over slavery, banking, manufacturing, trade, and foreign policy crops up the minute the Revolution ends, setting up the Civil War. Cobbs does a great service paying due homage to Hamilton, whom I had always thought a man of ability but an elitist. I’ve now learned that this is the viewpoint his detractors left to history, because they had the last word.

But it’s how he got those enemies that makes Cobbs’s narrative of interest. Her Hamilton doesn’t suffer a fool gladly, but there’s much more to it. How ironic that his opponents cast him as beholden to patrician interests when they’re the patricians — the Virginia planters like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, or the New York gentry like Burr or Clinton. As a largely self-taught polymath, a nobody who rises to be Washington’s right hand—his accomplishments are truly mind-boggling–Hamilton poses a threat to men who feel they have the right to rule. Throw in his intense dislike of slavery, and he’s doomed.

What a fascinating story, but as a novel, The Hamilton Affair seldom escapes a mechanical, ordained feel. Eliza, a woman much put-upon, would have been much more sympathetic (rather than an object of pity) had she more depth, as in a serious flaw or three. She represents important feminist ideals before they had that name, but she’d symbolize them all the better as a rounded character.

The narrative structure is the crucial weakness, though. Cobbs chooses key dramatic events for many chapters, which is fine, but the intent to cover her protagonists’ entire lives sets up gaps of time and circumstance, which in turn involves playing catch-up so that the reader doesn’t get lost. As a consequence, the author throws dozens of facts into dialogue and internal narrative, which land with a dull thud; and many chapters start at pivotal moments, only to backtrack, covering so much material that the forward narrative stalls. It’s just too much to fit, especially when the two principals don’t meet until about page 120.

If fact, description, and the march of history take precedence here, that leaves less space for emotions, and Cobbs surrenders to the temptation of telling rather than showing them, even at make-or-break moments. During the courtship, for instance, when Hamilton sees that he can’t put off telling Eliza about his birth and early life, you’d think he’d feel intensely pent-up. Here’s a man passionately in love with a beautiful, adventuresome, understanding young woman, yet he fears she’ll reject him once she knows the truth of his origins. This emotional moment, surely among the most significant of Hamilton’s life, receives a brief, rote paragraph.

I’ll say this for The Hamilton Affair: The book prompts me to put Ron Chernow’s highly regarded biography of the great man on my to-be-read pile. But as fiction, Cobbs’s novel tries to tell too much, and winds up showing too little.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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