I have been steadily working through The New Yorker today, and reached the Summer Fiction issue. (That would be mid-June for those of you wondering how behind I have fallen.) In past years, the SF issue introduced me to writers like Jonathan Safran Foer. The debut piece in this year's installment is "Sweetheart Sorrow," by David Hoon Kim.
I'd be willing to bet that Kim has been influenced by Haruki Murakami. Or rather, I was willing to put money down. But an extra search made the whole thing irrelevant (see page 2 of the interview for the confirmation). It wasn't just that the characters were Japanese - it was that they were out of place, living between cultures. And there was sorrow and silence, and a willingness to live inside the mind rather than wholly in the world.
Of course it is a quintessentially New Yorker story too. What that means exactly, I'm not sure. I know there is such a thing. And I've heard definitions. For me, it means that I read the last words under a curtain of solemnity.
But anyway, to the saddest expression ever. The title, it seems, is from the Danish "kæreste sorg—sweetheart sorrow—to describe the sadness one feels at the thought of a love affair nearing its end. A sadness one is not yet ready to face." The phrase is so evocative and real - I knew immediately and wholly what Kim - and the Danes - meant.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment