Your Republic Is Calling You

July 26, 2010
Spanning a single day, this tense spy novel from Kim (I Have the Right to Destroy Myself), marred only by some stilted prose, is also a deeply compelling study of the self and varying themes of trust. Kim Ki-yong, a North Korean spy who's lived undercover for 21 years, has fully adapted to life in Seoul, South Korea, where he runs a successful foreign-film importing business, owns a home, and has a wife and teenage daughter, neither of whom is aware of his past or actual identity. As Ki-yong ponders returning to the austere and sterile militaristic regime of the North after receiving a coded message from his handler ("Liquidate everything and return immediately"), his wife, Ma-ri, struggles with infidelity and his daughter, Hyon-mi, maneuvers the tumultuous and tricky landscape of adolescence. Kim offers a riveting tale of espionage along with keen observations of human behavior.

September 15, 2010

A spy living a fabricated life as a respectable businessman, husband and father is the embattled protagonist of this ambitious novel from one of Korea's most admired writers.

We quickly learn that Kim Ki-Yong, an importer of foreign films living in Seoul, was in fact born in North Korea, where he was trained as a spy and sent to South Korea to lay the groundwork for more "agents" like himself to infiltrate the territory pronounced disloyal to increasingly megalomaniacal dictator Kim Jong-il. But Young-Ha Kim (I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, 2007) has even bigger fish to fry, in a subtly layered structure of emotionally complex parallel stories. Disregarding an e-mail message that orders him to "return immediately" to North Korea, Kim Ki-Yong scrambles to stay a step ahead of fellow agents watching (and closing in on?) him while attempting to calm the women who do and do not love him. These are his wife Ma-ri, aging ungracefully and entangled in a bitter affair with a calculating younger man; his mistress Soji, who's the first to sense the full extent of his remoteness and detachment ("It always seemed you weren't really from here"); and his adolescent daughter Hyon-mi, a "stellar student" and expert player of the classic game Go, whose inchoate relationship with a male classmate subtly parallels both her parents' erotic misadventures. On another level, Kim's secrets and demons are contrasted with those of the allies, observers and enemies who will determine the shape of his ever-narrowing future. This intense novel's bristling plot—confined to the events of a single day—ironically echoes that of Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses, in the experiences of Kim (Leopold Bloom), Ma-ri (his wife Molly) and Hyon-mi (Leopold's ideal "son" Stephen Dedalus).

Challenging, occasionally forced and turgid, but energized by a powerful sense of the difficulty of "belonging" in a dangerous place and time. Perhaps the most intriguing and accomplished Korean fiction yet to appear in English translation.

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August 1, 2010
An e-mail changes Kim Ki-yongs life. Seemingly a piece of spam in the Seoul residents in-box, its actually a coded communiqu' from Pyongyang, ordering him to return to North Koreaimmediately. Ki-yong isnt a sleeper spy, exactly; its just that he hasnt received any orders in 10 years. Now, at age 42, he has spent exactly half his life in South Korea. He lives comfortably, working as an importer of foreign films, with lockstep life in the north only a distant memory. Will he meet the minisub and go back? Or will he defy the command and stay? This isnt really a spy story but a fascinating, personal portrait of life in a divided country and its toll on the citizens psyches. Its not just Ki-yongs story, either: his alienated wife, Ma-ri, is on her own intense journey of self-discovery, and, in complete ignorance of her parents worries, daughter Hyon-mi struggles with boys, school, and growing up. Kims thoughtful, effortless prose is a pleasure. His characters are completely relatable and their story is revelatory. A writer to watchand, of course, read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)