One Thousand Chestnut Trees, by Mira Stout Flamingo, 324pp, £16.99 in UK
Mira Stout's debut novel is a compelling portrait of a young Korean-American woman's search for identity, while Stout's three narrators from three generations provide a compelling portrait of Korea itself.
Until the arrival of her very Korean uncle, Hong-do, Anna's comfortable Vermont upbringing is as American as pumpkin pie. While she is close to her father, a painter, her relationship with her Korean-born mother, a concert violinist, is truculent. She finds her mother difficult and uncommunicative, as inscrutable as the country she comes from.
Anna gradually understands that Hong-do's eccentricities - his calisthenics in the garden, his slaying of garden snakes, and his culinary tastes - are really his futile attempts to transport Korean customs to New England. Anna and Hong-do become close and, when financial ruin forces him to return to Seoul, she becomes acutely aware of the void in her life.
Anna feels "derailed", a "socio-geographic amputee", a "phantom hybrid". Determined to find traces of her mother's past, she packs up everything and heads off to Korea for three months, and there faces her Doppelganger, her "shadow, the great Eastern spectre [she] had been avoiding her entire life".
At this juncture, Stout deftly intertwines Anna's narrative with those of Anna's mother and grandfather, in order to illustrate the alarming disparity between the way two, even three consecutive generations can view their native land. Whether at war or at peace, Korea is renowned as a country of maddening extremes and apparent contradictions.
Like its climate, which is bitterly cold in the winter and sweltering in the summer, Korea's cuisine revolves around the extremes of bland rice and incendiary pickles, such as Kimchi. Its people, too, are at once insular and gregarious, at once honest and well-practised in the vagaries of blackmail and bribery.
Appropriately, then, the view of Anna's grandfather, who was actively opposed to the Japanese annexation of Korea early in the 20th century, is profoundly different from her mother's at the end of the annexation and during the Korean War (1950-53). General MacArthur described the Korean War as "a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind", and it was from this slaughter that Anna's mother had escaped miraculously unscathed.
In going to the "Hermit Kingdom", as Korea is frequently called, Anna unwittingly chooses the lonely and vain road of hermit monks of the Chosun dynasty. While her visit to her grandparents' graves serves as an epiphany of understanding, the uncontested highlight of her pilgrimage is her regimented tour of the four kilometre-wide DMZ on the 38th parallel. Only there does she realise that she has bonded with the country; only there does she finally realise a bond with her mother and her "upsetting ways". In achieving specific goals, however, such as finding her great-grandfather's hidden temple and the estate of her mother's family, Anna suffers a series of defeats and disappointments, like generations of Koreans before her, and like them she acquires in these efforts, indeed in the journey itself, a distinctly Korean ability to rebound. Koreans do not give up.
In her journey to Korea, Anna, and probably Stout herself, discovers that bonding with a country is a very different thing from being of that country. The ultimate value of her pilgrimage lies not in reaching her destination but in the experiences gathered along the way.
Clearly a "novel" that demanded to be written, One Thousand Chestnut Trees is a persuasive portrait of both the alluring but tormented land that is Korea, and of its dispossessed generations. Stout's story is well-told; her characters are well-defined; some of her descriptive passages have the power to deliver the reader directly to the "Hermit Kingdom". What is most to Stout's credit, however, is that she has executed a Korean novel while successfully circumventing the Korean tendency to sentimentalise the past.
Ellen Beardsley taught in a Korean National University in the early 1980s; she is a writer, a critic and a tutor of English at UCC