Novel
휘청거리는 오후
Not translated into English
Pak Wan-seo · 1977
Synopsis
In Seoul, the shopkeeper Heo Seong and his wife have three daughters of marriageable age, Cho-hui, U-hui and Mal-hui. The father wants husbands for them with steady jobs and good reputations, who would raise the family's prestige; but his plans fall through one after another, and his faith in the capital's middle class wavers. Each marriage costs him dearly, money is always short, and the cult of material goods mingles with the love affairs of the three sisters, along with the double standard applied to women.
Context
The novel first appeared as a serial in the Dong-a Ilbo from 1976. Harper's Bazaar Korea reads in it the disenchantment of a father of a family at what becomes of his ambitions of respectability; the publisher Segyesa, which reissued it in 2012 in the definitive edition of the author's works, stresses the materialism of the period and the unequal demands made of women. It belongs to the first decade of its author's novelistic work.
Who it is for
A long novel, centred on a family, its marriages and its accounts; it has not been translated into French.
Prizes and reception
Reissued in 2012, a year after the author's death, as the sixth volume of her complete works.