Review | Heartbreak and otherworldly beauty from Korea’s most famous novelist, Hwang Sok-yong, in Familiar Things

Familiar Things
by Hwang Sok-yong
Scribe

Nothing prepares the reader for the strange, otherworldly beauty and heartbreaking sadness of this novel by Hwang Sok-yong, arguably South Korea’s most renowned author.

Familiar Things opens with a slow, measured, wide-angled sweep. It lingers over images of a sunset before slowly zooming in on a rubbish truck racing along a riverside expressway, and then a young boy who is standing in the back of the truck.

It’s as if Hwang is urging us to look at the world around us before bringing his characters into focus, gradually divulging snippets of information about the boy and his mother, who were joined by five other people who climbed up into the truck at a waste-collection site.

But then the hypnotic power of Hwang’s measured, unpretentious prose kicks in. There’s a reason Hwang is one of the most read and honoured writers in his homeland as well as the best known internationally. As he writes of “vehicles swallowed up by clouds of dust” and of the “tall silver grass swaying on the banks of the stream in the dusky light”, readers may feel, just like the boy – as yet unnamed – “that they had suddenly arrived in a faraway land”, instead of a rubbish dump on Flower Island, close to the city.

It is also one of the marvels of this unusual narrative that this magical sense of being suspended in a faraway land persists even as Hwang writes of the smell that assails these people in the back of the truck as they draw close to their destination, “a stench so bad, they could hardly breathe”.