Amazon Customer reviews: Drifting House

Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Drifting House
Drifting House
byKrys Lee

Top positive review
See all 19 positive reviews›
One person found this helpful
5.0 out of 5 starsDrifting In An Age of Instability
ByJill I. Shtulmanon February 14, 2012
The Drifting House - the debut collection of Krys Lee - contains many good stories and some truly exceptional ones. And like all short story compilations, readers are bound to gravitate to their own favorites.

For me, a few of them really sang. In the first, A Temporary Marriage, Mrs. Shin has been forced to endure an abusive relationship and enters a sham marriage with another Korean named Mr. Rhee. As a result of her divorce, she loses custody of her daughter, whom she is determined to see again. But has she courted her own abuse? Phrases such as "her wounded body continued its ancient song" sum up, in a few sparse words, what the theme of the story is really about.

Then there's The Goose Father - the traditional name for a father who faithfully sends money to his family overseas. The father - a one-time poet - takes in a young boarder who carries an actual goose with a wounded wing. In powerful prose, the father - Gilho - must come to terms with his true inclinations and his lifetime loneliness and alienation.

The Salaryman is stunning in its understated, naturalistic prose. In this story - told in second person - we watch a solid Korean businessman lose his job, his family, his confidence, and ultimately, his very humanity. It's like watching a train wreck; it's hard to look away.

There are many other good ones as well - the eponymous Drifting House, the most surreal of the lot, where two brothers and their very young sister try to escape North Korea's countryside famine by fleeing to China. Yet they cannot escape their ghosts. And in The Believer, a mentally deranged Korean American woman commits a heinous crime; her daughter tries to comfort her father by performing an unspeakable act.

Ms. Lee is a young writer who is willing to take risks as she focuses her talent on those who are damaged, lonely, yearning. It's not uplifting - marriages fail, men lose their sense of masculinity, women lose their sense of value, and most everyone feels displaced. Yet it offers amazing insights into the hopelessness and frustration that define a Korea that's been through war, financial draught, and instabilities.
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Top critical review
See all 4 critical reviews›
5 people found this helpful
3.0 out of 5 starsBeautiful but Frustrating
BySuzion March 7, 2012
At times, I felt like Lee's writing was beautiful in a simple but poised manner. There were passages that were so heart-wrenching that I could have cried. Lee often writes with wonderful and stunning imagery, that you feel like you can understand why this collection of short stories has received so many good reviews and praise. However - for me - there was as much frustration in reading these short stories as there was wonder,if not more. Her painfully literal translations of Korean phrases is jarring and often disrupts the flow of her work. While you know that the characters are not actually saying these literal sentences in English for someone who may not be familiar with the Korean language, it's awkward to have these well-developed characters full of personality saying such mechanical sentences to one another. They words lose their meaning when you make them so exact and the characters are no longer as believable. When my upperclassmen ask "' '''?" (Pap mogosso)they aren't asking if I have had rice exactly but simply whether or not I've eaten anything yet. These literal translations are so distracting and that is such a shame.

There were also times when characters would do something that seemed to clash with everything else the character has done and who the character has been explained to be. I feel like the juxtapositions could be truly meaningful, and I'm sure that they were written purposely, but without some kind of justification of these seemingly bizarre change in action or personality, they detract from the integrity of the characters. I also found some of the texts to be awfully word, or there were sensory overloads that took away from the deeper meaning of the story. Krys Lee has so much to say and so much too share, but so much of it gets lost along the way. Reading this collection I felt like a professor who has a brilliant student who just doesn't see the value or the point in making that extra effort in their work. I feel that you can always read Lee's potential to be a truly great writer, but she rarely seemed to fulfill that potential for me. Her work often left me with a feeling that she has an uncomfortable detachment to the subjects she writes about, I felt like she struggled to express these things that she didn't fully know herself, particularly in her story "Drifting House".

But, having said all of this, I would like to say that there were several stories in this collection that I absolutely adored - "At the Edge of the World", "The Goose Father", and "The Salaryman". And "The Pastor's Son" and "A Small Sorrow" almost made the cut as well. In these, Krys Lee effectively portrays these very human and genuine characters with real struggles that a large audience can identify with. They are Korean, and their Korean identities is a strong part of who they are and why they are but these factors don't overwhelm who they are as individuals or override their unique personal conflicts. In my opinion these stories - where Lee isn't trying too hard to present everthing as Korean or Korean-American, but simply showing us people and their everyday battles - are the most beautiful of all. I think that if she can find her voice and continue to write honest and penetrating stories like these I would quickly add her to my list of favorite authors. I honestly think these five stories make buying the collection of nine worth it, if only to get an idea of what she may come up with next.
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5.0 out of 5 starsDrifting In An Age of Instability
ByJill I. ShtulmanTOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICEon February 14, 2012
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
The Drifting House - the debut collection of Krys Lee - contains many good stories and some truly exceptional ones. And like all short story compilations, readers are bound to gravitate to their own favorites.

For me, a few of them really sang. In the first, A Temporary Marriage, Mrs. Shin has been forced to endure an abusive relationship and enters a sham marriage with another Korean named Mr. Rhee. As a result of her divorce, she loses custody of her daughter, whom she is determined to see again. But has she courted her own abuse? Phrases such as "her wounded body continued its ancient song" sum up, in a few sparse words, what the theme of the story is really about.

Then there's The Goose Father - the traditional name for a father who faithfully sends money to his family overseas. The father - a one-time poet - takes in a young boarder who carries an actual goose with a wounded wing. In powerful prose, the father - Gilho - must come to terms with his true inclinations and his lifetime loneliness and alienation.

The Salaryman is stunning in its understated, naturalistic prose. In this story - told in second person - we watch a solid Korean businessman lose his job, his family, his confidence, and ultimately, his very humanity. It's like watching a train wreck; it's hard to look away.

There are many other good ones as well - the eponymous Drifting House, the most surreal of the lot, where two brothers and their very young sister try to escape North Korea's countryside famine by fleeing to China. Yet they cannot escape their ghosts. And in The Believer, a mentally deranged Korean American woman commits a heinous crime; her daughter tries to comfort her father by performing an unspeakable act.

Ms. Lee is a young writer who is willing to take risks as she focuses her talent on those who are damaged, lonely, yearning. It's not uplifting - marriages fail, men lose their sense of masculinity, women lose their sense of value, and most everyone feels displaced. Yet it offers amazing insights into the hopelessness and frustration that define a Korea that's been through war, financial draught, and instabilities.
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3.0 out of 5 starsBeautiful but Frustrating
BySuzion March 7, 2012
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
At times, I felt like Lee's writing was beautiful in a simple but poised manner. There were passages that were so heart-wrenching that I could have cried. Lee often writes with wonderful and stunning imagery, that you feel like you can understand why this collection of short stories has received so many good reviews and praise. However - for me - there was as much frustration in reading these short stories as there was wonder,if not more. Her painfully literal translations of Korean phrases is jarring and often disrupts the flow of her work. While you know that the characters are not actually saying these literal sentences in English for someone who may not be familiar with the Korean language, it's awkward to have these well-developed characters full of personality saying such mechanical sentences to one another. They words lose their meaning when you make them so exact and the characters are no longer as believable. When my upperclassmen ask "' '''?" (Pap mogosso)they aren't asking if I have had rice exactly but simply whether or not I've eaten anything yet. These literal translations are so distracting and that is such a shame.

There were also times when characters would do something that seemed to clash with everything else the character has done and who the character has been explained to be. I feel like the juxtapositions could be truly meaningful, and I'm sure that they were written purposely, but without some kind of justification of these seemingly bizarre change in action or personality, they detract from the integrity of the characters. I also found some of the texts to be awfully word, or there were sensory overloads that took away from the deeper meaning of the story. Krys Lee has so much to say and so much too share, but so much of it gets lost along the way. Reading this collection I felt like a professor who has a brilliant student who just doesn't see the value or the point in making that extra effort in their work. I feel that you can always read Lee's potential to be a truly great writer, but she rarely seemed to fulfill that potential for me. Her work often left me with a feeling that she has an uncomfortable detachment to the subjects she writes about, I felt like she struggled to express these things that she didn't fully know herself, particularly in her story "Drifting House".

But, having said all of this, I would like to say that there were several stories in this collection that I absolutely adored - "At the Edge of the World", "The Goose Father", and "The Salaryman". And "The Pastor's Son" and "A Small Sorrow" almost made the cut as well. In these, Krys Lee effectively portrays these very human and genuine characters with real struggles that a large audience can identify with. They are Korean, and their Korean identities is a strong part of who they are and why they are but these factors don't overwhelm who they are as individuals or override their unique personal conflicts. In my opinion these stories - where Lee isn't trying too hard to present everthing as Korean or Korean-American, but simply showing us people and their everyday battles - are the most beautiful of all. I think that if she can find her voice and continue to write honest and penetrating stories like these I would quickly add her to my list of favorite authors. I honestly think these five stories make buying the collection of nine worth it, if only to get an idea of what she may come up with next.
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5.0 out of 5 starsStrong, sad stories of transformation (some) and resignation (others). War, politics and poverty invade the intimate corners of
Bykaren sosnoskion March 24, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
I recommend this to anyone who is not afraid to look at how politics intersect with personal relationships and deep sexuality. The stories feel very real.
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5.0 out of 5 starsA great collection short stories
Byrebecca wimberlyon March 1, 2016
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
A great collection short stories. I like the author's ability to capture your interest and immerse you into the soul of the character.
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5.0 out of 5 starsRaw and real
ByBrianon April 16, 2012
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
I read these stories as an expat living in Seoul. Some of the stories are so real, you can almost smell them. Some of the moments are heart-wrenching. Amazing stories. I highly recommend picking up this book.
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5.0 out of 5 starsWe All Live in Drifting Houses
ByFairbanks Reader - Bonnie BrodyTOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICEon February 4, 2012
Format: Hardcover
Drifting House by Krys Lee is one of the very best collections of short stories I have ever read. They are right up there with Alice Munroe. The stories are all about Korean people, their culture in Korea and the immigrant experience in the United States. The stories share several thematic elements: loss, separation, solitude, a sense of being out of place and situations of violence that are often painful to read. The author examines the limits of what human beings are capable of and how they endure.

In A Temporary Marriage, a woman leaves Korea for the United States in the hopes of finding her daughter who her ex-husband kidnapped. She enters into a marriage of convenience in order to have the correct paperwork to be in the United States. Here, she searches for her daughter in California.

At the Edge of the World is about Mark, "nine years old and he knew everything". He is more like nine years old going on forty. However, he is friendless and the other children his age torment him in endless ways. When a girl his age, Chanhee, moves in next door, they befriend each other. Chanhee's mother is a shaman and Mark's mother is a christian who despises shamanism. When Mark's father visits the shaman, all hell breaks loose in the family.

The Pastor's son is about the cycle of family violence and abuse. After the death of his mother, Jingyu and his father move to Seoul where his father marries his dead wife's best friend, a promise he'd made to his first wife before she died. There ensues a family from hell despite the pastor supposedly being a man of god. The pastor's son says, in a moment of insight, "I saw the violence that my father had grown up with and passed down to us. I felt what my father must have always carried with him: the terrible war, its long ago shadow that cast far beyond and drew you in like a thirsty curse".

In The Goose Father, Gilho is a goose father, a man in Korea who supports his family living overseas in the United States. To assuage his loneliness, he takes in a tenant, Wuseong. Gilho's life becomes transformed and reaffirmed in ways he could never have predicted.

The Salaryman is a very powerful story about the financial crisis in Korea and a worker who is let go. He gives everything he has to his wife and children and takes to living in the streets - desolate, lonely and hopeless.

Drifting House is about two young boys and their crippled sister who trek from N. Korea to China to try to find their mother who deserted them. The life of poverty they live is inconceivable; "an eleven-year-old with a body withering on two years of boiled tree bark, mashed roots, and the occasional grilled rat and fried crickets on a stick". Finding an acorn that can be divided in three portions is a real gift to them. Some of the people in their village have even reverted to cannabalism in order to stave off their hunger.

The Believer is one of the more violent stories in the book. Jenny had always believed in god and was even attending seminary school. However, she loses faith when she comes home to the site of a violent murder committed by her mother. Their family falls apart and despite the excrutiating emotional violence that Jenny endures, her search for god continues.

The stories are all about people who are dislodged from their lives in some way, passing time until something new might possibly occur. Many are waiting for an epiphany that is just beyond reach. They are caught up in the cycle of poverty, the immigrant experience, family violence, and the absoluteness of time. Some are dealing with sexual issues or sexual awakenings. They all live in a drifting house, some carrying their homes on their backs and others going from one land to another. This is a brilliant book and I highly recommend it.
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5.0 out of 5 starsI literally found this on Bookoutlet for like four dollars and was attracted to the minimalist typography
ByXian Xianon December 31, 2015
Format: Paperback
When it comes to books written by East Asians, the ones that tend to get the most recognition are Japanese. At least from what I've seen. I've never heard of Krys Lee, I literally found this on Bookoutlet for like four dollars and was attracted to the minimalist typography. (yes, I'm really that dorky.) It wasn't anything too surreal, no magical realism, no post-apocalypse. This was more like a slice-of-life\ collection, I thought it would also be similar to Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-Ha Kim. Which is kind of close in bleakness, with Murakami isolation and prose, and a sort of post-apocalyptic world that is silent and only occurs with the lack of human contact.

This was the best short story collection I have ever read in 2015 other than From Here by Jen Michalski. They both contain oddity, taboo, and societal otherness and isolation. Ranging in topics from Korean diaspora to death in the family to Korean fathers to Post WWII and the Korean War, there's a lot of different perspectives and lives to peek into. One of my favorite stories was "At the Edge of the World" a story about a son who's just discovering himself and navigating his path between Korean and American and a father who can't seem to get his tragic past out of his head. What really touched me the most about this story was the relationship between the father and son, the distance and the barrier, culturally, maybe linguistically, it was just super relatable to me.

Another favorite of mine is the last story in the collection called "Beautiful Women," about a fatherless daughter and her relationship with her mother. Depicted in this story is the stigmatization of a woman who's African American military husband died in the war and is single. Not only is she ostracized for her interracial relationships but is also treated as a second class citizen due to just being a woman. The story explores the world of single women and the daughters born into that world, where they are looked down upon for not fitting tradition. The daughter imagines throughout the story, her missing father figures, what they are like and the meaning of hers and their existence. It's another touching story on familial relationships and the missing fragments of our lives.

There is a lot of speculation in this collection, a lot of brow raising subjects like taboo relationships and the supernatural. There aren't any sci-fi or unicorns, but fantasy does tend to slip in throughout the collection, as the dysfunction and isolation in a character's life seems to break the barrier of logic, reason, and stability.

The writing style is all in third person view and Krys Lee manages to be one of the few writers who can pull it off wonderfully, without characters becoming too cardboard. They actually have physical and emotional movement, they are not merely a name mentioned throughout the story. Her prose is much like free verse poetry, seasoned with simile that just bring up the right imagery. It just works somehow.

Overall, Drifting House is pretty solid. Best short story collection I've read since the summer.
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3.0 out of 5 starsOkay read, one story almost ruined it for me...
Byelowynon November 3, 2016
Format: Paperback
Drifting House started off as just a quick, easy read for me to pass some time, as I do like to read and have not had the time to do so with my schedule...There are several short stories and they all touch on very real and complex issues and situations, some are better than others. I was getting more immersed in the book with each story but after a while I just couldn't take anymore. I know that life can be hard and that's just the world we live in, but I think that one of the stories in particular was just too much for my personal taste. I am by no means a prude or one who likes a lot of "fluff" literature,but I don't need gratuitous writing to keep me hooked, and that's the feeling I got the more I read.
There are other really well written and interesting stories in Drifting House, it was just too much for my taste after a while...
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4.0 out of 5 starsIntense and heavy content
ByCofeenuton May 18, 2012
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
This is a powerful book- one that is sure to leave a lingering sense of haunting discomfort and perplexity, which is exactly why I enjoyed this book. It's definitely a book you have to be in the "mood" for. If you're looking for a light, fun, happily ever-after story this is not the book. If you are looking for something to provoke, unsettle, and almost terrify and make you feel slightly nauseous (like the train wreck you can't stop watching) then this is your book! I don't mean this in a negative way, not at all. It's the messiness and darkness that makes this book attractive. However, be forewarned- it's raw, gut-wrenchingly raw, and I know at least for myself, I was ready for the book to be finished about 4/5 of the way through the book. However, that just might be a sign that the author did her job brilliantly.-
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