Hwang Sok-yong is a very well-known author in Korea. I've not read any of his work, but if this work is anything to go by, it would be interesting to read, albeit a bit splintered.

> I was never tortured. I was arrested several times during the Yushin dictatorship of the 1970s and once jailed for disobeying martial law declared after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee, but I never got so much as a slap across the face. Was I lucky, or were my stunts too tame to make it worthwhile? My fellow writer friends used to joke that one of these days my luck would run out and I would get my comeuppance. Thinking back, luck had something to do with it, but it probably helped that I was also a famous young novelist with a large, mainstream following, one who had serialized a saga titled Jang Gil-san every day for the past ten years in the pages of a daily. When I was first arrested at the airport and dragged, blindfolded, to this underground room, the anti-Communism investigators tried to intimidate me by shoving me into a corner and having a phalanx of investigators bark questions at me. A skinny man with piercing eyes cursed at me as he swung his fists. I had readied myself for this. I ducked the blows, pushed him away, and tore off my shirt. —What, the law isn’t enough for you? Fine, torture me. Hit me! The investigators tried to calm the other man down and pulled him away, calling him “Siljangnim,” which allowed me to guess that he was the section chief. I still remember what he said to me before he left. —You bastard, you think the world has changed? You think all you got to do is bullshit a little and we’ll let you go? We’re gonna flay the skin off your ass!

Hwang tells many tales, both from his activist and dissident life, and also from interpersonal experience with other people throughout the globe.

> I was a country bumpkin on his first overseas trip, and as the Europeans I met kept asking “Who are you?” I naturally began asking myself the same question. Who was I? I was forty-two. I had written four novellas and a volume of plays and had just published the tenth volume of my popular novel Jang Gil-san, which I had serialized since 1974. My work, however, did not exist outside of Korea. I promised myself on the plane that I wouldn’t even bother mentioning literature: I would only talk to as many people as possible about the plight of the citizens of Gwangju and our democracy movement.

The book jumps back and forth through time, through places, marriage and not, while painting a stark picture of a human being trying to exist under the thumb of a very authoritative government, with all that entails.

> “I am not a communist.” This was the first thing Yun I-sang said to me after shaking my hand. I was taken aback. “You don’t have to worry about that with me,” I replied. After he was arrested in 1967, someone had written about him saying how he couldn’t possibly be a communist because his music was too modern. The Soviets and the Eastern Bloc had believed any modernist music or experimental art to be reactionary.

> West Berlin in 1985 was like a desert island in the middle of East Germany. In essence, it was a city under occupation by the forces that had won World War II. No one could imagine that the wall looming over Berlin’s gloomy, peaceful cityscape would fall in a few years. Whenever I visited Berlin afterward, I would always find it odd that there was still no direct flight between Seoul and the German capital, and remember the grey walls towering above.

This book is almost 700 pages long, and I feel it should have been shortened. In my mind, it would have felt better if tightened-up, but that's just my own sentiments, and I've read an uncorrected advance proof of the book. Still, the structure and length of the book has nothing to do with translation.

Altogether, this book says a lot about both Hwang and the daily life of an artist when threatened with censorship, imprisonment and torture. ( )