I Went to See My Father is one of the most fair and balanced treatments I’ve seen of the estrangement that can accompany growing up.
I Went to See My Father dramatizes and explores the question that confronts many adult children: is it ever possible to really know one’s parents? In the words of the narrator, Hon, “If it’s the nature of memory to go wrong, is it all right for me to keep believing in the things I thought were true?”
The paragraph could just as easily serve as a thesis for this entrancing, subtly insightful novel by Kyung-Sook Shin, which is both a family saga and an ode to the ability of storytelling to make sense of the disorder of life. They are spoken during an interview conducted by the narrator, Hon, who is in search of stories about her father’s past. These are the words of a minor character, Park Muleung, near the end of I Went to See My Father. I wonder if my act of reading was a search for such traces.” Traces of having endured unspeakable situations. People for whom things did not turn out the way they wanted, who fought unhappiness all their lives-they leave a trace of themselves. How endlessly good, and yet endlessly violent. How weak we are and also how strong we are. “I could understand humanity through books.
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