![]() ![]() But the weird fascination of Please Look After Mom is its message - completely alien to our own therapeutic culture - that if one's mother is miserable, it is indeed, the fault of her husband and her ungrateful children. To give it its due, Shin's novel, which was translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim, is marked by a wistful tone and by some precisely-rendered scenes of emotional disconnect between a mother and the adult children who've grown apart from her. They, too, must share a weakness for melodramas about maternal self-sacrifice, although Please Look After Mom outsniffles even those immortal weepies of the western canon, Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce. The back cover of the American edition, brought out by Knopf, is filled with blurbs by heavyweights like Gary Shteyngart and Edwidge Danticat. How else to explain why Please Look After Mom, a new novel by Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin, has already sold over one-million copies in her native South Korea? This literary phenom is scheduled to be published in 22 other countries and has just come out in the U.S. Mama Mia, who knew that Koreans outstrip Italians and Jews when it comes to mother guilt! ![]()
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