Novel
Evening Glow
노을
Kim Won-il · 1978
Synopsis
Kim Gap-su, forty, lives in Seoul and returns to the small southern town he had avoided for twenty-nine years. In 1948, when communists had seized the town, his father, a poor butcher won over to the left and become a “hero of the people”, had killed his adversaries before the eyes of the eleven-year-old child, so that he was called the butcher of men. Gap-su hated this father and those who had drawn him in. Back among the places and people of the past, he confronts his childhood and that past.
Context
The novel appeared in serial form in Hyundae Munhak from September 1977 to September 1978, then in volume form from Munhak-gwa Jiseong in 1978. The Literature Translation Institute reads in it the story of people whom ideology and Korean history have stripped of their humanity, and the idea that this history can be overcome only by restoring to each person their humanity through love and forgiveness. The Maeil Shinmun recalls that Jinyeong, where the author lived as a child, is the beginning and the end of his work; a passage of the novel is engraved there on a stele.
Who it is for
A novel in two time frames, the present-day return and the childhood of 1948; translated into English in 2003 and into French in 2014.
Prizes and reception
Also translated into German in 2014, with the support of the Korean institute in charge of translations.
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