Hwang Sok-yong

BooksAuthorsSubscribeAbout UsContact UsPRINCESS BARIHwang Sok-yongTranslated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell'Hwang Sok-yong is undoubtedly the most powerful voice of the novel in Asia today'KenzaburÅ ÅOEe, winner of the Nobel Prize for LiteratureIn the North Korean city of Chongjin, a seventh ......

Princess Bari

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charisa

i'm really torn about this one. the start was SO promising: a loose, colloquial narrative about north korean life interlaced with magical realism elements. i was reminded a little of my maternal grandmother's own story of fleeing the country in the 50s. truly, such an appealing premise and a fairly decent translation (!!!) as well. 

about halfway in, however, the novel took a jarring turn as bari lands in london and begins to lean into her shamanistic proclivities. all of a sudden, there's a lot of commentary on war and trauma and cross-cultural exchange, elevated through pretty horrifying visions. i understand what hwang was attempting to do, but his approach comes across as abrupt and halting. i don't even think it's the translation's fault per se. i wish he had spent more time detailing bari's upbringing and had been a little less heavy-handed with the spiritual realm. the magical realism could have worked on a smaller scale, i think, but not as a tool to literally explain away all of human suffering lmao. still a thought-provoking piece and a searing window into wartime trauma.

A modern-day quest novel from one of Korea's most renowned novelists. Princess Bari tells the story of a young girl, frail and brave, who escapes from famine and death in North Korea in the 1990s. Seeking refuge in China before crossing oceans in the hold of a cargo ship, she disembarks in London, with its strange mix of different cultures, religions, and languages. In this foreign city, Bari becomes a masseuse, but she doesn't just heal the body, she also comforts souls, having learnt from her beloved grandmother to read the pain and nightmares of others. Alone and in a strange land, Bari will have to fight, through pain and deepening sadness, to find love and the will to stay alive. With Princess Bari, Hwang Sok-Yong entwines an old Korean myth - of an abandoned princess travelling to the ends of the earth to find the elixir of life, which will bring peace to the souls of the dead - with the ethereal and haunting backdrop of the modern world.

Jamieson

I realised that life means waiting, enduring the passage of time. Nothing ever quite meets our expectations, yet as long as we are alive, time flows on, and everything eventually comes to pass


Princess Bari is a translated South Korean novel, and the coming of age tale of a North Korean girl, Bari, who escapes with her family to China during the famine before finding herself illegally moving to London. Hwang Sok-yong deals with politics, family trauma and war, drawing out and examining the struggles of refugees, and the politicisation of their plight. Some of the fantasy elements went a little over my head, but I still enjoyed this as border fiction, particularly for it's rendering of North Korea before and after the Korean War, and it's discussion around war and the response from western countries to its victims.

Princess Bari

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