Our October Author: Kim Young-ha

This month we are reading Your Republic Is Calling You by the  South Korean novelist Kim Young-ha. The author has a website with biographical information and an overview of his other books and a Facebook page which offers a few links to interviews and events. Interviews and material in English are a little scarce, but there is this PEN American Center panel appearance--you may want to start around the 37 minute mark for where Kim comes in:



For the nickel summary of this panel check out this blog post from 3%.

Much of the material from this interview in the Beijinger deals with works other than Republic, but there are some interesting insights, like this:

Between a widespread diaspora and the division of North and South, Korean identity is wrought with questions of nation, race, belonging ... how much does this background influence your desire to write, and your choices for the topics of each book?When I was a child, my father was an army officer. My family had to live near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where I was always hearing the North Korean propaganda speeches. That experience made me think a bit about strange themes like border, nation, prohibition, death, belief and so on. Growing up near the DMZ, one of the most dangerous areas in the world, is quite a rare experience. I think my childhood was the most crucial thing for my ability to write novels. Your Republic Is Calling You, my fourth novel, is the story about a forgotten North Korean spy. It is not just a coincidence that I pick this kind of 'borderline' character. He lives half his life in the North and the other half in the South. I have always felt myself standing on that border.

A few more nuggets might be gleaned from this KBS interview.

For October: Your Republic is Calling You by Young-ha Kim

For September, we have selected Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-ha Kim,

A foreign film importer, Gi-yeong is a family man with a wife and daughter. An aficionado of Heineken, soccer, and sushi, he is also a North Korean spy who has been living among his enemies for twenty-one years.

Suddenly he receives a mysterious email, a directive seemingly from the home office. He has one day to return to headquarters. He hasn’t heard from anyone in over ten years. Why is he being called back now? Is this message really from Pyongyang? Is he returning to receive new orders or to be executed for a lack of diligence? Has someone in the South discovered his secret identity? Is this a trap? 

Spanning the course of one day, Your Republic Is Calling You is an emotionally taut, psychologically astute, haunting novel that reveals the depth of one particularly gripping family secret and the way in which we sometimes never really know the people we love. Confronting moral questions on small and large scales, it mines the political and cultural transformations that have transformed South Korea since the 1980s. A lament for the fate of a certain kind of man and a certain kind of manhood, it is ultimately a searing study of the long and insidious effects of dividing a nation in two.