Please Look After Mom

Book by Shin KyungSook

“Shin’s novel, her first to be translated into English, embraces multiplicity. It is told from the perspectives of four members of [a missing woman’s] family; from their memories emerges a portrait of a heroically industrious woman. [Mom] runs their rural home ‘like a factory,’ sews and knits and tills the fields. The family is poor, but she sees to it that her children’s bellies are filled . . . Only after her children grow up and leave their home in [the countryside] does Mom’s strength and purposefulness begin to flag. Questions punctuate [the] narrative and lead to a cascade of revelations, discoveries that come gradually. . . Shin’s prose, intimate, and hauntingly spare, powerfully conveys grief’s bewildering immediacy. [Daughter] Chi-hon’s voice is the novel’s most distinct, but Father’s is the most devastating. . . . And yet this book isn’t as interested in emotional manipulation as it is in the invisible chasms that open up between people who know one another best. . . . A raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood.”
—Mythili G. Rao, The New York Times Book Review

“The universal resonance of family life lifts a novel rooted in the experience of Korean modernity to international success. A best-seller in her native South Korea, Shin’s Please Look After Mom tells the story of Park So-nyo, a devoted, do-all wife and mother who mysteriously goes missing. . . . Primarily composed of four sections narrated by Park, her eldest son, her husband, and one of their two daughters, the book—Shin’s first to be translated into English—is a moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood. . . . As the novel progresses and Park’s whereabouts remain unclear, much that can be forgotten between mothers and children, husbands and wives, and among siblings resurfaces in the voices of this family desperate to locate the one person who was and always will be the center of their lives.”
—Lisa Shea, Elle

“Lovely . . . This heartbreaking yet joyous novel is Kyung-sook Shin’s first to appear in English. You could say it marks a first, loving gift to readers of English. Her publisher’s press release notes that the book ‘has sold more than 1.5 million copies in the author’s native South Korea.’ Understandably so. Please Look After Mom, especially its magical, transcendent ending, lifts the spirit as only the best writing can do.”
—Anthony Bukoski, Minneapolis Star-Tribune 
 
“We may know her favorite color, or flower, or meal. But how well do sons and daughters, even when grown, really understand what motivates their mothers?  Please Look After Mom is a suspenseful, haunting, achingly lovely novel about the hidden lives, wishes, struggles and dreams of those we think we know best. . . . Shin’s deft use of second person lends this story an instant intimacy. . . . There are few ways to describe this story that don’t involve the word ‘devastating.’ Seemingly small details explode into larger meaning at a pace that takes one’s breath away. The depth of each character’s guilt and regret over Mom’s absence—and what they wish they’d said and done differently—is palpable. The story deftly juxtaposes images of modern Korea with wartime Korea, of city living with country life, of ultra-processed ramen with the crumbly dust of freshly dug potatoes, of Mom lugging heavy jars of homemade pickles and elixirs on the train ride from her country house to nourish her children in the big city. As the family grapples with its newfound understanding of the woman they thought they knew, we’re given a window onto the culture and customs of Korea, its food, festivals, traditions and family dynamics. This book is not for those who crave easy resolution; just like family, it prompts worry, consternation, guilt, heartbreak, and tears. Shin’s style of writing makes it simple for readers to transpose their own families into such a scenario, and the onslaught of emotion that the narrative evokes is strangely cathartic. But, just like family, this novel also delivers ultimate gifts: moments of gorgeous lucidity, love that knows no depth, beauty in the details of many long-held memories.”
—Karen Gaudette, The Seattle Times 

“Intimate . . . Reflective meditations on motherhood and a ruminative quest to confront mysteries . . . ­[The novel’s] accumulating voices form a kind of instrumental suite, each segment joined by the same melody of family nostalgia, guilt and apology, and each ­occasionally plucking away at several larger motifs: country vs. city living, illiteracy vs. ­education, arranged mar­riages vs. modern dating, traditions vs. new freedoms. . . . [Please Look After Mom] will strike a chord with many readers, stimulating their own recollections or regrets. Truth be told, I called my mom well before the book’s final page, feeling the need to look after her a little myself.”
—Art Taylor, The Washington Post

“Haunting . . . Fervent . . . but also sinuous and elusive . . . Details, unembellished and unsentimental, are the individual cells that form this novel’s beating heart. . . . [Shin] re-create[s] a life through fragmented family recollections [and] leads the reader on a switchback journey to the past, historical and personal. . . . The novel’s language—so formal in its simplicity—bestows a grace and solemnity on childhood scenes . . . The rhythms of agrarian life and labor that Shin deftly conveys have a subtle, cumulative power. With each description, the relentless tide of the past erodes the yielding ground of the present to reveal the contours of one woman’s life. . . . Memory is the only guide and the least reliable one . . . Revelation arrives quietly, but truth remains the sole property of the lost.”
—Anna Mundow, Boston Sunday Globe 
 
“A great literary masterpiece [that] perfectly combines universal themes of love and loss, family dynamics, gender equality, tradition, and charity with rich Korean culture and values.”
—Lesley Stack, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Titles to Pick Up Now: This best-seller set in the author’s native Korea examines a family’s history through the story of the matriarch, mysteriously gone missing from a Seoul train station.”
—Karen Holt, O, the Oprah Magazine

“[Please Look After Mom] can be read on several levels, as a metaphor for the impressions of the past as they linger in the present, as a story of mothers and children, husbands and wives. It describes one woman’s self-sacrifice so that the next generation may realize their dreams, instead of putting them to the side as she had to. . . . It reveals the emergence of a post-war metropolitan society in the twentieth century . . . A captivating story, written with an understanding of the shortcomings of traditional ways and modern life. It is nostalgic but unsentimental, brutally well observed and, in this flawlessly smooth translation, it offers a sobering account of a vanished past. It is the seventh novel by the much-praised Kyung-sook Shin and the first to be translated into English after a best-selling 1.5 million print run that changed the face of publishing in Korea in 2008. We must hope there will be more translations to follow.”
—Kelly Falconer, The Times Literary Supplement
 
“Kyung-sook Shin has crafted soul-touching moments out of the simplest of her characters’ gestures, and makes all of her characters sympathetic, genuine and unforgettable. Please Look After Mom is the perfect novel to remind us just how much a mother unites an entire family and how they are always a part of us even when they might be separated from us. No matter what the culture or what part of the world, the mother holds a sacred place in the life of every father, daughter and son.”
—Alison Reeger Cook, Gainesville Times 
 
“Quite apart from the universal sentiment it expresses so well, Please Look After Mom is intriguing for its X-ray insight into the mind and experience of an uneducated woman born to generations of subsistence farmers in a remote, mountainous region of the old Hermit Kingdom. It is a cultural leap that most modern readers could scarcely imagine, but it occurs with miraculous ease over the book’s 237 pages. . . . Shin uses the remorseful memories of the lost mother’s loved ones to personalize the cultural chasm that separates modern Koreans from their immediate, pre-industrial past.”
—John Barber, Globe and Mail (Canada)

“A deceptively simple book about a mother’s sudden disappearance. . . . Hauntingly intimate . . . Startling . . . Vivid . . . Please Look After Mom is filled with raw emotions, and characters that often display unlikeable and destructive behaviors. But there is such delicate awareness in Shin’s narration that each character, however faulty, remains entirely accessible. The author masterfully destabilizes the novel with the use of multiple viewpoints, and in some sections employs the second-person address to draw the reader in. In this way, she points to the ways in which we are all complicit in the small (and sometimes large) abuses of motherhood. Yet the mother in this novel is so tender . . . that Shin reminds us that motherhood is perhaps one of the most radical acts: the most selfless job in the world. Shin never borders on dogma. Instead, she allows her characters to speak to and through institutions and traditions that treat the mother figure as an unflawed ideal, and in doing so gives light to both the damaging and fulfilling a...