...compelling and heartrending ... The setting early in the story is late-1990s North Korea, and Hwang is peerless in his depiction of the mass starvation during the famine ... [Hwang] has traveled to all the places traced in Princess Bari, and it shows in his nuanced descriptions of landscapes ... Unlike many foreign-born novels that are written to be agreeable to translators to target as wide an audience as possible, Princess Bari retains aesthetic originality and difficulty. Regional allusions, references, and traditional lyric songs abound. To top it all, the book is awash in North Korean dialect and onomatopoeic adjectives, which Hwang employs to affect poetry in his prose ... translator Sora Kim-Russell does an admirable job of recreating the narrative in smooth English ... Unfortunately, some musicality endemic to the original Korean has been lost ... With Princess Bari, Hwang challenges the hegemony of Western norms and myths in world literature, which rarely uses Eastern myth in its storytelling.
Hwang Sok-Yong’s Princess Bari, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, is an unquestionably valuable book ... In its strongest moments, Princess Bari suggests not a uniformity of immigrant experience, but enough shared experience to build a new kind of identity. It also serves as a challenge to readers to remember the voices of those who may choose not to speak ...
Sentenced in 1993, renowned South Korean writer Hwang...served five of a seven-year sentence for making an unauthorized trip to North Korea to promote artistic exchange between the divided nations. Combining brutal adversity, escapist fantasy, and deep humanity, Hwang—adroitly Anglophone-enabled by expert translator Kim-Russell—indelibly alchemizes the plight of the North Korean refugee, and refugees worldwide, into resonantly timely storytelling.
Hwang uses Bari’s isolation and quiet agony to depict the psychic trauma that settles into the lives of those who are displaced. ... A mesmerizing odyssey through the beauty, suffering, and rage that flow from the irrepressible desire to live.
