A new work by the literary genius of our time. Can there be any doubt about what I'm buying with that gift certificate?
I thought Toni Morrison's last novel, Love, was way underappreciated. I remember sitting on the subway on the way home from work as I finished reading its final pages and frantically trying to maintain my composure and control my facial muscles to prevent myself from collapsing into sobs. God it packed a wallop. It was so brilliantly constructed. I didn't know what had hit me.
I've also just heard that this is coming out in January:
What interests me is that part of the plot has to do with U.S. soldiers in the Korean War. I look forward to reading it because there is so little literature that even acknowledges that vile war. The U.S. invaded a sovereign country to prevent the victory of the socialist revolution led by Kim Il Sung that was sweeping the Korean peninsula; by war's end the imperialist allies had divided the nation and killed 5 million people. To this day U.S. troops still occupy Korea to prevent north and south from reuniting, the dearest wish of the vast majority of Koreans.
Me, I've been working off and on for over a year on a short story whose main character is an elderly man whose whole adult life has been distorted by the atrocities he took part in as a GI in Korea. (Here's an article about the U.S. massacre of Korean civilians in 1950 at No Gun Ri.) Lately I've been reworking it to have it set at the present moment, during the Fall 2008 presidential campaign. My protagonist has led a stunted life secretly haunted by his Korean victims; perhaps there's some redemptive way back into society for him now. If I could pull it off it would be a nice counterpoint to the lies and hypocrisy in the official story of John McCain. Hailed by one and all as a war hero, he is in fact a war criminal. He was one of the willing, conscious, committed murderers of thousands of Vietnamese civilians during Operation Phoenix. The My Lai massacre is the most well known event of Operation Phoenix but the hundreds of people killed there make up just a fraction of the victims of McCain and his cohort.
