Here are the circumstances of Mom’s disappearance, just to give a sampling of the book’s Dickensian extremes: Mom seems to have wandered through Seoul until she became dirty, disheveled and sick. Shin means to give each a highly personalized scolding. Mom’s high-strung careerist daughter and Mom’s faithless husband are both addressed by the author as “you,” as if Ms.
So the book is divided into sections, each devoted to the browbeating of a particular character. But we need to learn about her saintliness in stages. “Mom,” as she is jarringly called throughout the book’s English version (translated by Chi-Young Kim), was much more than that. It would be a grievous understatement to call her a mere martyr. 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. “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.
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