[Aftershock Note No. 2] The Discipline of Walking Nowhere

There is a particular kind of walking that has no destination, and I confess I did rather a lot of it once, in an Edinburgh winter I would rather not describe in any greater detail than this.

I have been rereading Choi In-ho's Winter Wanderer this week — a novel that, like the Schubert song cycle it borrows its title from, refuses on principle to arrive anywhere. Min-woo walks through the snow with nowhere in particular to be, and for years I mistook this, in my own case, for simple weakness. It has taken the better part of thirty years to see it differently.

Walking nowhere, I now suspect, is a kind of discipline — perhaps the only one grief permits. One cannot fix an ending onto sorrow any more than onto a river. Yet we now dispose of disappointment briskly: an unkind message, deleted; a match, unmatched. Grief today is seldom allowed to wander — it is filed, closed, swiped past, on the theory that speed and healing are the same thing. I remain unconvinced.

I did eventually come indoors, for what that is worth. But I remember the walking more clearly than whatever sent me out into it. Perhaps that is the only mercy grief ever grants — that the wandering outlasts the reason for it.

'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh

Translating Yeong-hye: Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Its Three Witnesses

The first sentence of Han Kang's The Vegetarian belongs to a husband, and in Korean it is little more than a shrug. Before his wife stopped eating meat, he says, he had never thought of her as anyone special. In Deborah Smith's English the same man remembers her as "completely unremarkable in every way", which is a harder thing to say about the person you chose to marry. I have read the two openings side by side more often than I would care to admit, and the gap between them has occupied me for years. It is not a large gap. It is the width of an adverb or two. Yet the novel is about nothing so much as the distance between what a woman is and what the people around her say she is, and on the very first page the English edition has already widened it by a notch. That English edition has had an extraordinary life. It shared the Man Booker International Prize with its author in 2016, the first year the award went to a single book and was divided equally between writer ...

The Land That Remembers: Park Kyung-ni's Toji and the Borrowed Earth of Pearl Buck

There is a particular grief reserved for books, and I do not mean the grief of closing a good one. I mean the grief of losing one entirely — not to fire or flood, but to the far more mundane violence of removal men and cardboard boxes. When I left my university lodgings for the last time, hauling the wreckage of an unfinished doctorate back to my mother's house, an entire shelf of my collection simply vanished somewhere between Edinburgh's Old Town and the outskirts I now call home. Among the casualties was my set of Park Kyung-ni's Toji: sixteen volumes, painstakingly assembled over three years of a student's meagre stipend. I have since replaced them, of course. But the replacement copies sit on my shelf with the slightly formal air of a stepfamily; they have never quite forgiven me for losing the originals, and I have never quite forgiven myself. I mention this because Toji is, before it is anything else, a novel about precisely this kind of loss — the loss of land...

Two Fathers, One Legend: On the Three Kingdoms, Twice Told

I found it, as one finds most things worth keeping, entirely by accident. Tucked between a chipped hardback of Gibbon and a water-stained atlas, on a shelf in one of those narrow, book-crammed shops that still cling to the West Port here in Edinburgh, sat a single volume with no dust jacket and a title in gilt lettering so worn I had to tilt it towards the window to read it: Romance of the Three Kingdoms . The bookseller, a taciturn man who has sold me more regrettable purchases than I care to admit, glanced up and said only, "Ah. That one takes a fortnight." He was, as it turned out, being generous. What he did not say — what almost nobody outside a handful of specialists ever bothers to say — is that the book in my hands had two fathers, and they disagreed rather violently about what sort of book it ought to be. The first father was Chen Shou, a third-century court historian who compiled the Sanguozhi , a dry, careful, admirably unglamorous chronicle of the period. T...

James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

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