The Guest

By Hwang Sok-yong and Kyung-Ja Chun

Based on actual events, The Guest is a profound portrait of a divided people haunted by a painful past, and a generation's search for reconciliation.
During the Korean War, Hwanghae Province in North Korea was the setting of a gruesome fifty-two day massacre. In an act of collective amnesia the atrocities were attributed to American military, but in truth they resulted from malicious battling between Christian and Communist Koreans. Forty years later, Ryu Yosop, a minister living in America returns to his home village, where his older brother once played a notorious role in the bloodshed. Besieged by vivid memories and visited by the troubled spirits of the deceased, Yosop must face the survivors of the tragedy and lay his brother's soul to rest.
Faulkner-like in its intense interweaving narratives, The Guest is a daring and ambitious novel from a major figure in world literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781583229729

Hwang Sok-yong

Hwang Sok-yong was born in 1943 and is arguably Korea’s most renowned author. In 1993, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for an unauthorised trip to the North to promote exchange between artists in the two Koreas. Five years later, he was released on a special pardon by the new president. The recipient of Korea’s highest literary prizes, he has been shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger and was awarded the Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature for his book At Dusk. His novels and short stories are published in North and South Korea, Japan, China, France, Germany, and the United States. Previous novels include The Ancient Garden, The Story of Mister Han, The Guest, and The Shadow of Arms.

Reviews for The Guest

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Yusop, an older man who has lived in New Jersey for many years, returns to his native North Korean village, the site of a gruesome massacre during the Korean war. The Communists attributed the massacre to American troops. Yusop knows, however, that the bloodshed was caused by clashes between Christian and Communist (non-believers) Koreans in the village and surrounding areas. While this could have been a moving and riveting novel of an elderly man's return to the site of his youth, and of how he has resolved the horrors he witnessed, the author instead chose to use the story as a vehicle for what is often a philosophical dialogue on Christianity and Communism. While details of life in current day North Korea were interesting, I felt that characters and plot were secondary in this novel. I didn't care for it. My rating of 2 1/2 stars does not mean that it's poorly written; just that I did not like it