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The protagonist's present life is pictured through roots, and the story keeps returning to them: how a tree dug up and moved to new ground suffers, and how people torn from the places they lived suffer in the same way. Through this pairing it takes in the painful course of Korea's modern history, from colonial rule and war to industrial development and the machine age, and the fear and sorrow of everyone those forces left uprooted. Its descriptions are dense and patient. Against the unease and drifting of modern lives it sets two kinds of root, the shallow ones that spread out sideways and the deep ones that strike straight down, and asks whether the two might live side by side, so that something torn up can take hold again.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Short story

Length

352 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Nature (assigned by AI)

First published

2014 by Munhak Sasang

Author's age

40 when first published

ISBN

9788970129136 (original)