Hwang lays his characters before us without comment, their behaviour presented with acute and precise powers of observation but he leaves us to be the judges of whether they are acting morally, and he is not concerned with whether we like them or not. But with others it’s hard to like them (the young man who alternates between kicking his pregnant wife in the stomach and having sex with her) and often impossible to engage with them or even care.
Sometimes you have to admire the characters, who are enduring desperate hardship with resilience and maybe some dignity. Characters are painted in particular situations or landscapes, sometimes idyllic rural villages, sometimes urban locations. These are snapshots, without much action or story.
Taken as a whole, this collection represents story-telling as painting. The first collection, The Pond, was written in the 1930s and for good or ill is the most different to what you might expect from a modern short story. It’s a story that just doesn’t grab me, and when I am told that it is a perennial favourite in Korea I am dumbfounded. I went in with tempered expectations, however, not being a fan of Hwang’s most famous short story, Shower (from 1953), in which boy meets girl, both get caught in some rain, girl gets a cold and dies.
Having quite enjoyed two of Hwang Sun-won’s fuller-length stories – Trees on a Slope and Descendants of Cain – though without necessarily being enamoured of the characters of the stories they inhabited, I was looking forward to tackling Lost Souls, a splendid publication which brings together three of Hwang’s short story collections from different decades in his life ( The Pond – 1930s, The Dog of Crossover Village – 1940s and Lost Souls – 1950s).
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