Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook

Shocked into decency, her husband, two sons and two daughters find themselves replaying all the button-pushing, tear-jerking moments that illustrated this woman’s love and devotion.

The book is about the selfish family of Park So-nyo, a woman who got lost in the crowd at a train station in Seoul and has not reappeared. It sold more than a million copies in South Korea, where there may not be a dry hankie left in the land. Arguing that restraint expresses more than exposure, like modesty versus porn, I would have preferred no Epilogue.īut this family is richly characterized, its dynamic pace and its members unforgettable, the smallest details of their everyday lives mined to express the depth of the complexity, contradiction and mystery with which families evolve.“Please Look After Mom” is the work of a popular South Korean novelist, Kyung-sook Shin, who is being published in English for the first time. With its obvious Christian icons, it also felt somewhat pasted in, or too easy a resolution.

The lengthy Epilogue is voiced again by the writer-daughter as she goes to Rome and, regarding Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” finds at last the spirit of her mother as she prays to the statue to “please look after Mom.” This section felt melodramatic to me in the way that much of Korean cinema and television can be over the top, bearing down on points already made, bleeding them for their last ounce of emotionalism in a much-beating-of-breath manner familiar to Korean drama. It helped to draw a full circle of this family, and show the richness of her character, the honest selflessness and love she offered (suffered for) her children. I appreciated finally giving Mom a voice at the end of this book, as she roams ghostlike to check in on her family members and the house she raised them in. SPOILER ALERT: THIS PARAGRAPH ADDRESSES CONCERNS IN THE LAST TWO CHAPTERS. But in most instances, second person here is easily interchanged with first person. Its use makes sense because of its inherent accusatory tone, and also because on the surface it avoids the “I” narrator, which could be perceived as a more egocentric presentation of character.

It is both a winding and unwinding tale of modern Korean life, the delicate and sometimes disturbing intricacies in the relationships of this family, and of a mother’s love.Īt times, the persistent use of second person felt problematic, especially toward the end. Each narration covers the search efforts for Mom, and also reveals history between that narrator and Mom, showing more and more about this family, and also explaining how it is possible that Mom could go missing. The story begins, “It’s been one week since Mom went missing.” What follows are narratives of or by each of the family members: two daughters, eldest son (there’s a younger son who isn’t given a voice), husband, and one other voice, beginning with the daughter who is a writer.

Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook