Son Bo-Mi

about

Son Bo-mi, to say the least, is extraordinary​—extremely adept at creating an alternate universe and with such skill. Not only is she inventive, but her prose verges on being Chekhovian​—reminiscent of ​one of my favorite authors: the great Alice Munro. Son is a major, major talent. Janet Hong will translate.

Books

The Little Village

Published by Moonji Publishing Company

LITTLE VILLAGE OPENS ALMOST INNOCUOUSLY, only to turn into a detective story seething with secrets of a family, a mysterious village, female celebrities, and beyond. A deft storyteller not unlike Liane Moriarty, Son Bo-mi presents to us a pager turner that also fathoms the complex interiority of characters like many of Amy Hempel’s masterful, introspective stories.
The first person narrator of Little Village is living a life far from the “little village” where she grew up until she became eleven years old. She works as a part-time college instructor, and occasionally as a translator. She is married to a man who works in Fiction entertainment and who is in the habit of collecting articles about the celebrities he manages in a scrapbook.
But her perfectly normal life is uprooted by her mother’s death, followed by persistent phone calls from her long-estranged father who left her and her mother decades ago. Her father brings back her memories about the “little village,” where her brother, before she was even born, died in a devastating fire along with a lot of other villagers. And the stories her mother confided in her on her deathbed start to haunt the protagonist. Soon she finds herself trying to grapple with the true narrative of her family, her hometown, and her girlhood, in what seems to be a maze of hearsay and memory. How come every household in the village decided to have a dog, in order to honor a family member lost in the fire? Why was the protagonist’s mother inexplicably attached to the once-famous diva who was holed up in their hometown? What did her mother have to do with the diva’s death? Why is the protagonist drawn to the famous femme fatale celebrity from her husband’s company, just as he mother was to the reclusive diva? Why is her husband so obsessed with the scrapbook?

All these little questions, which turn out to be carefully-scattered puzzle pieces, fall into place and slowly complete the true picture of the “little village.” And the picture revealed at the end is one that’s chilling to the bone and deeply moving at once.