Description:
Over the course of a three-day funeral, a woman discovers new sides to her deceased father in this hilarious and heart-tugging masterwork from one of Korea's most fearless writers.
So, Father died. Slammed his head into a telephone pole. A very serious man had seriously come to the end of his very serious life by seriously slamming his head against a telephone pole.
Following her father's sudden death, university lecturer Ahry returns to her rural hometown of Gurye to hold his funeral. As a child, she avidly listened to her father's stories about guerrilla warfare. But the older she got, the more ridiculous his revolutionary mindset seemed. A former communist partisan who fought in the Korean War, Sangwook remained a devout socialist in capitalist South Korea. Never wavering in his wish for an equal world, he lived by the rigid principle of "Serve the People," a belief that only brought trouble to their doorstep. To Ahry, her father was a failed revolutionary who never got over his youthful dreams.
But as she discovers, Sangwook did serve the people--and. changed lives--in his own unique way. A colorful cast of characters gather at the funeral home to pay their respects, including Ahry's alcoholic and resentful uncle, her father's childhood best friend who holds very different political views, the children of former compatriots, a teenage dropout turned cigarette buddy, and the other Sangwook, a policeman her father saved from certain disaster. And as friends and comrades recount her father's life--his glory days as a partisan, his fake treachery to protect his people, his tangled relationship with his family--Ahry realizes she has much to learn about her unforgettable father.
An unlikely bestseller ten years in the making, Jeong Ji-a's semi-autobiographical novel illuminates a part of Korea's overlooked history and its unsung partisan fighters. Translated by the award-winning Anton Hur, My Father's Liberation is a witty and poignant tale of a passionate man and the impact of his decisions on his country, his family, and history itself.
Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur
Brief description: Jeong Ji-a was born in 1965 in Gurye, Jeollanam-do, South Korea to socialist parents. She received her PhD in Creative Writing at Chung-Ang University. Her first novel, The Partisan's Daughter, was classified as "enemy-benefiting material" and banned for ten years. Meanwhile, her ties to Nodonghaebangmunhak (Labor Liberation Literature), a journal of the Socialist Workers Union of South Korea, made her wanted by the government for several years. She was sentenced to probation but returned to literature through a new writer's contest and went on to author the short story collections Happiness, Light of Spring, and The Forest Speaks. She won the Chosun Ilbo New Writers Contest, the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award, the Today's Novel Prize, and the Hahn Moo-Sook Literary Prize. My Father's Liberation is her second novel.
Review Quotes:
Astonishing how the story of one's father, shunned from society for his ideology, can be told so hilariously... The reader will laugh out loud at least five times while reading this book, but the pathos that lingers after the laughter is striking. I read the whole book in one sitting. The narrator speaks of her father almost unremarkably at times, but even in those moments we learn the breadth of a life-shattering historical tragedy and the many layers of man who never once wavered in his convictions. MY FATHER'S LIBERATION begins with laughter and ends with solemn reflection. That is the power of Jeong Jia. - Kyung-Sook Shin, author of PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOM
At once tender, witty, and devastatingly candid, Ahry is unlike any character I've ever read. In Jeong Jia's MY FATHER'S LIBERATION, Ahry weaves a captivating story of her father with a eulogy of a time in Korean history that fragmented a country and a family. Denial, grief, politics, love, and excruciating moments of joy and sacrifice, this novel of a daughter making sense of her father's death surprises and enthralls. - Jimin Han, author of DREAMT I FOUND YOU and THE APOLOGY