I was so looking forward to this story of Korea under Japanese rule, through WW2, until the separation of north and south--and then into the unions' fights for rights for their workers.

The family parts of this story--home life, food, work, ghosts, Jino on his perch--were fine and interesting.

The union parts were like baseball play-by-play without a color commentator. Very dull. It read like a boring history text, but this is fiction! Way too long, too many meetings and meetings to set up meetings and meetings over soup and walking around to avoid being seen meeting.

Second book from the IB longlist in which train employment is an important part of the story. A very different look at that employment here though. ( )

115000

I didn't finish this book. I got about half-way through and then it had to go back to the library. I might take it out again once I don't have so many books that "must be read".

Well…wouldn’t you know it. The little I knew about the Korean war from my U.S. education was shamefully wrong. No wonder governments and the people who shill for them are afraid of writers.
In her piece for The Nation marking the 70th anniversary of the Armistice between the bifurcated Koreas, Grace M. Cho states that “writers such as Hyun Ki-Young and Hwang Sok-Yong, who shed light on civilian massacres through their fictional works, faced imprisonment, torture, and exile. To be a south Korean citizen who did not actively disavow communism or who was related to a suspected communist was to risk a terrible fate at the hands of the state.”
Hwang Sok-yong faced some or all of that for his works. The brilliant Mater 2-10 is my first encounter with his writing.
Mater 2-10 is a multi-generational novel that highlights the struggles of the Korean people and workers for independence from Imperial powers and against the oppression of elite capitalism and the state mechanisms that support it. The clever narrative mechanism to relate the story is a striking worker staging a sit-in atop a factory chimney and his conversations with the ghosts of his ancestors and other family acquaintances who take him back generations to tell the story of his family and nation(s). I had no real idea of how the Koreans were used and suffered from the imperial Japanese and U.S. occupations. I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to fill in the huge holes in how most of us understand this history.
I’ll be on the lookout for other books of his, especially the one about his reluctant service in the Republic of Korea Marine Corps supporting the U.S.