At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong – review | Books | The Guardian

At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong – review | Books | The Guardian




At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong – review
An architect has bittersweet thoughts about the society he has helped build in this powerful novel by South Korea’s most renowned writer


Ben East

Sun 25 Nov 2018 20.00 AEDT

Comments0 Hwang Sok-yong: hard-won wisdom. Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images


Successful architect Park Minwoo is looking back on his life in South Korea. “Everyone thinks it’s good to be an architect, because your buildings will stand long after you’re gone,” he says. “But for all you know, they could be left looking greedy and ugly.” It says everything about the kind of nation South Korea’s most renowned writer, Hwang Sok-yong (inset), depicts in this short novel. It’s a regretful, bittersweet exploration of modernisation, which picks away at the country’s past and present, slowly becoming a moving reflection of what we gain and lose as individuals and a society in the name of progress.

At Dusk, which in French translation won the Emile Guimet prize for Asian literature earlier this year, is a fascinating counterpoint to the author’s last novel in English, Familiar Things. They share an interest in the overlap between the traditional and modern worlds, but where the former used fantastical elements in its study of a community living on a landfill site, here the narrative is more conventional.

Park Minwoo receives a message from a childhood love, which dredges up memories of people and places on the fringes of the city, long since forgotten after fame and fortune came his way. He goes back to his birthplace and realises it could be any anonymous village: “it was as if me and my long-departed parents had never really existed”. Young theatre director Jung Woohee, meanwhile, works night shifts at a convenience store just so that she can afford a miserable room with “two fluorescent lights, one in the middle of the room and one over the sink”.

Their tales converge in ways that would be the stuff of soap opera if it were not for the spare prose; Sora Kim-Russell’s translation becomes a real virtue as the build-up of anecdotes and memories from Minwoo’s past gradually layer into a powerful yet modest and profound meditation on personal responsibility and what a fulfilled life might mean.

Yet At Dusk never trips over into nostalgia or sentimentality. Looking back, Minwoo expresses remorse for his selfishness in not getting involved with the fight for social justice in Korea. Hwang, now 75, was himself sentenced to prison in the 80s and 90s for breaches of “national security” laws. His writing is laced with the hard-won wisdom of a man with plenty left to say.


• At Dusk is translated by Sora Kim-Russell and published by Scribe (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.43 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99