Discoveries

Southerners, Northerners

A Novel

Lee Ho-Chul, translated from the Korean by Andrew Killick and Cho Sukyeon

EastBridge Press: 250 pp., $22.95 paper

Lee HO-CHUL, born in 1932 in what is now North Korea, is one of South Korea's most important authors. Here he tells the story of his conscription into the North Korean Army and life as a POW. In 1950, Lee is in high school. Political zealots are the class clowns; throughout, it's those who, in their desperation, spout the Communist line who are most scorned by classmates or fellow soldiers. One day, several students are issued uniforms and told to join the troops. They don't even have time to tell their families. Soon comes their first bombing: "A ton of iron falling vertically above your head makes a sound as piercing as if the whole earth were about to crack apart, and seems to reach your eardrums not through your ears but through some other orifice." Lee's observations are clearly, poetically rendered (a young officer is "handsome as the full moon"). He retains the youthful sense of not knowing where you're going or what will happen to you. "If the new world ... was simply a matter of hanging placards and portraits of Stalin everywhere ... if all there was to it was substituting Russkies for Japs -- well, what was so earth-shattering about that?" Degrees of bourgeois affiliation are scrutinized at length, as if these small matters could help explain the war. In the end, Lee's literary instincts save him. One night when the POWs are lined up in front of a firing squad and pleading for their lives, he gazes, inexplicably, upward: "Wow, look at all those stars in the sky," he shouts. "It's amazing. It's really amazing."

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The Good Man

A Novel

Edward Jae-Suk Lee

Bridge Works: 248 pp., $21.95

Edward JAE-SUK LEE is a Korean American from Kansas. This stunning novel is about a soldier, Gabriel Guttman, who returns 40 years after the Korean War to the Montana ranch where he grew up. As a young man, he left his sweetheart, Emily Cottage, filled with a sense of duty that was quickly replaced by regret. "We are made of our pain," one character declares, and this idea is the taproot of the novel. Gabriel's memories -- of shooting women and children, of lines of refugees on dusty roads -- blend with the present. He appears on the doorstep of an elderly Korean woman he had brought home with him many years ago, when she was a pregnant refugee. Emily is long dead, and Gabriel, with the help of the woman's 16-year-old daughter, tries to recall what happened in the years since his first homecoming; his memory has been shredded by a bullet that pierced his brain in a suicide attempt. The novel's format is a kind of untelling, a tale revealed layer by layer as the narrator's memories return. There's a hint of Willa Cather and of "Cold Mountain," but the ghostly presence of the Korean War, all the more senseless for coming so soon after World War II, fills the novel with an eerie existential light, a randomness the most robust plot cannot contain.