Honored Guest of the 2005 Frankfurt International Book Fair

Born in 1943, Hwang Sok-yong is a Korean writer of world renown, the recipient of numerous awards and honors. His work, which grapples with the troubled recent history of his divided country, has been the cause of his imprisonment, his exile, and finally that rare achievement of a wide readership and appreciation in both North and South Korea. Le Vieux Jardin is, by the author’s own admission, his most deeply autobiographical work.

Political prisoner 1444, O Hyônu, is freed from prison after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopianist dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed, aggressively modernized. Han Yunhi, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yunhi once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, he relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth—a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history.

Hyônu weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yunhi, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-yong grapples with the immortal questions—the endurance of love, the price of causes—while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life for the dream of a better tomorrow. Through the eyes of O Hyônu , the author assesses contemporary South Korea, whose “masses have fallen into inertia”, whose “youth has traded in idealism for hedonism, hypocrisy, and opportunism—the qualities needed to succeed”.