via The LA Times
Whether it’s English village life or contemporary Olso, imported crime fiction has long given readers a peek at the underbelly of cultures outside their own. And yet Korean crime fiction, which has existed for at least 100 years, woefully trails the critical acclaim of Korean cinema that culminated in this week’s Oscar for “Parasite.” The genre is just beginning to show signs of crossover success in the U.S.but still lags far behind the reader-friendly “Nordic noir,” or “Tartan noir,” that’s been in fashion for a while now. It doesn’t help that our perspective has been, until lately, refracted primarily through the lens of ostensibly knowledgeable non-Koreans like former intelligence officer James Church, author of the Inspector O series, or Martin Limón, whose U.S. military service informs several of his 1970s-era Sueño and Bascom mysteries.
For me, the first harbinger of Korean lit as a global phenomenon was Kyung-Sook Shin’s “Please Look after Mom,” a bestselling South Korean literary novel about a long-suffering rural woman’s disappearance and her selfish family. It was awarded the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize, despite being panned by one American critic as “kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction.” Five years later, Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for “The Vegetarian.” And after a few fits and starts over the past decade, the publication of “The Good Son” in 2018 and “The Plotters” a year later gave Korean mysteries in particular a well-deserved boost.
Joining that small but growing body of work is Mi-Ae Seo’s newly translated novel, “The Only Child,” which exposes American audiences to the ties that bind and break two very different Seoul families.
Although this is Seo’s English-language debut, “The Only Child” isn’t her first published work; in Korea, she’s an accomplished screenwriter, novelist and recipient of a national prize for detective literature. The novel’s protagonist, forensic psychologist Seonkyeong, is given the opportunity to interview a notorious serial killer, Yi Byeongdo, who has requested the meeting. But Seonkyeong herself is a bit of an impostor, having leveraged a brief FBI training course she took while studying at an American university into a post teaching criminal psychology in Seoul. “By the time Seonkyeong became familiar enough with the vast FBI Academy to find the bathroom without getting lost,” Seo writes, “the training was over.”
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