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language: Korean (English tr. Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton)
country: South Korea
year: 2009
form: novel
genre(s): speculative
dates read: 8.1.23-11.1.23
I’m obsessed with Haïlji’s The Republic of Užupis (tr. Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton). it’s partly Renee Gladman’s Ravickians and Morelia — wandering the unfamiliar urban landscape, desperate to belong but unable to do so — and partly Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore — the search for something you knew and have lost that may not ever have existed, that you can only find approximations and tantalizing hints of — if it were good instead of utterly insufferable.
Hal, a traveler from an Asian country called “Han”, arrives in Vilnius, Lithuania, in search of his father’s homeland, the Republic of Užupis — a once-independent state now apparently subsumed by Russia, Lithuania, and others — of which he has only vague childhood memories and a few mementos left after his father’s death. he wanders through Vilnius following scraps of his lost country: a pianist playing the national anthem, a figure in the snow calling to him in a language he understands but can no longer speak, a room he recognizes but can’t quite remember. the closer he gets to (maybe) Užupis, the more he’s drawn into its history, caught up in the repeating cycle that’s structured his life since before he was born.
I also thought the back cover blurb’s claim that ”Haïlji, while appearing to shun Korea, is in fact examining the yearnings and dislocation of his contemporary Koreans” seemed like probably a way to reassure anglophone readers that even though it’s set in Lithuania they’re still getting Korean Literature™, but…a country colonized by an imperial power and released only in fragmented, partitioned form such that nobody can remember (or will admit to remembering) what came before, its culture and history subsumed and displaced into other nation-states or simply denied…sounds familiar…
the national allegory by no means exhausts the novel. it’s so good.
(n.b., content warning for suicide)
moods: inspiring, mysterious, reflective