Friday Finds

The Old Garden by Hwang Sok-Yong

Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopian dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yoon Hee once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, Hyum Woo relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth—a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history.

He weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the Wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-yong grapples with the immortal questions—the endurance of love, the price of a commitment to causes—while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life for the dream of a better tomorrow.

The Others by Seba al-Herz

A sheltered teenager living with her protective mother and studying Islamic jurisprudence at a women's college, the nameless narrator falls into a passionate physical relationship with another student named Dai, who is despotic and fiercely jealous. Given to flights of breathlessly manic description, the narrator depicts her secret shared moments with Dai in ecstatic bursts, all the while exploring Internet homosexual chatrooms and dabbling in flirtations with men and women. Erratically, she reveals details about herself, such as that a health issue has decreased her marriage prospects in a culture where early arranged marriage is the norm (her best friend essentially disappears when she gets engaged); as well, the narrator suffers from the losses of her father and brother.