![]() ![]() ![]() Please is filled with raw emotions, and characters that often display unlikeable and destructive behaviors, but there is such delicate awareness in Kyung-sook Shin’s narration that each character, however faulty, remains entirely accessible. In startling turns, simple but vivid memories reveal Mom’s years of suffering, brought on by a lifetime of feeling her life has no value outside of maintaining her home. Told in four chapters, each corresponding to one of these main characters, this book remains hauntingly intimate and embodied throughout the course of this family’s musing about Mom’s guarded emotional and physical decline. And finally, a mother, who finds herself lost both literally and metaphorically, traces her own sadness as she walks unimaginable distances through the South Korean countryside in a search that ultimately leads her home and to the memory of her own mother. A son realizes how much his mother gave up for him to succeed. A daughter learns that she never knew her mother the way she thought she had. After losing his wife at a Seoul train station, a father tries to piece together her slow, ambiguous dissociation and his part in her depression. So begins Kyung-sook Shin’s best-selling Korean novel Please Look After Mom, a haunting and deceptively simple book about a mother’s sudden disappearance. “It’s been one week since Mom went missing.” ![]()
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