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bentohbox's review
4.0
Tender, haunting, and poetic. I think the setting of a small island off the coast of mainland Korea is a really interesting setting to play with, and Yoon did so well writing characters that filled the stories with conflicting grace. Every story lingers with you in a memorable and calming way.
rastephe's review
3.0
A nice collection of short stories. I love Yoon's writing style and some of the stories were very moving. His writing has a very sparse, austere, quiet quality about it. I find it beautiful, but reading the stories one after the other made this style less appealing. I should have spaced them out. My brain started to revolt: "here we go, another sad and lonely person." I don't mind a sad story, especially one as beautifully written as these, but I wish he'd written about something less dismal on occasion to break up the melancholy a bit. When it's all sad, they start to compete in my head in a "which character has it worse" contest, in which, really, no one wins.
alik_alig's review
4.0
A great collection of short stories from a Korean-American author. I lived in Korea for some time and it was a nice way to reconnect with that. There are some really poignant and beautiful moments in the stories, and they're all quite different but fit together nicely into a cohesive collection. I really enjoyed reading it and would reccomend it to others interested in short stories, Asia, World War II, or the ocean.
barrabas's review
4.0
4.5 stars
Once the Shore consists of 8 short stories, all with connections to a fictional Solla Island off the coast of South Korea. These stories are beautifully written, and the settings and characters incredibly detailed, although it rarely feels like filler. The stories have melancholic yet magical undertones as the characters within them realistically go through the motions of life, all with life's ambiguity and mystery.
*SPOILERS*
My favorite stories out of the eight were Look for Me in the Camphor Tree and The Hanging Lanterns of Ido. The former perfectly captures elements of magical realism and loss, while the latter a story of regret, longing, and acceptance.
Once the Shore consists of 8 short stories, all with connections to a fictional Solla Island off the coast of South Korea. These stories are beautifully written, and the settings and characters incredibly detailed, although it rarely feels like filler. The stories have melancholic yet magical undertones as the characters within them realistically go through the motions of life, all with life's ambiguity and mystery.
*SPOILERS*
My favorite stories out of the eight were Look for Me in the Camphor Tree and The Hanging Lanterns of Ido. The former perfectly captures elements of magical realism and loss, while the latter a story of regret, longing, and acceptance.
drewjameson's review
4.0
Yoon's writing is so gorgeous it can be quite distracting. I frequently would get lost in these wistful sentences and realize that I had lost track of the story. The most effective of these stories were those with the clearest sense of time and place, and the most utilitarian prose: "Once the Shore," "The Hanging Lanterns of Ido," and "Among the Wreckage." The other stories seem to exist in their own lyrical dreamworld. They were beautiful places to get lost, but I did feel lost often, holding onto the few specific details that reminded me if we were in 1947 or 2001. Yoon is clearly a fine, talented writer, but some of these felt like writing for the sake of writing. Still, I'm more than willing to give all of these stories a second read, and I'll jump to read his next piece.
savaging's review
5.0
Ever since Flannery O'Connor explained writing to me -- against all my best objections -- I've been looking for writers who know how to create a symbol. An object that has heft and a smell and texture and wasn't placed there to do anything but exist, but then afterwards haunts the reader with its greedy accretion of meaning (think of the prosthetic leg in "Good Country People").
Crotchety O'Connor would be proud of Paul Yoon and the sewing machines, dried squid, marbles, abandoned fishing boats, blue dresses, and walking sticks of this island. She would also gruffly tip her hat to the way ideology -- or Yoon's sharp vision of the power imbalances of nationality, race, gender -- don't ever interrupt or constrict the story, but grow straight out of them like turnips.
Why am I writing about O'Connor anyway? That damn southern Catholic seeps her way most everywhere. My only point is that Yoon creates stories that manage to feel both like a dream and like a boot in your face. I loved "Among the Wreckage," "Once the Shore," "So That They Do Not Hear Us," "Faces to the Fire" -- if I keep going I'm just going to name them all. Easier to say what I didn't like, which is "The Hanging Lanterns of Ido" (after all the stories of the marginalized I found myself without patience to read the details of the vacay time of the island's yuppies).
(Thanks Missy for telling me to read this! I still believe you should do book-recommending professionally!)
Crotchety O'Connor would be proud of Paul Yoon and the sewing machines, dried squid, marbles, abandoned fishing boats, blue dresses, and walking sticks of this island. She would also gruffly tip her hat to the way ideology -- or Yoon's sharp vision of the power imbalances of nationality, race, gender -- don't ever interrupt or constrict the story, but grow straight out of them like turnips.
Why am I writing about O'Connor anyway? That damn southern Catholic seeps her way most everywhere. My only point is that Yoon creates stories that manage to feel both like a dream and like a boot in your face. I loved "Among the Wreckage," "Once the Shore," "So That They Do Not Hear Us," "Faces to the Fire" -- if I keep going I'm just going to name them all. Easier to say what I didn't like, which is "The Hanging Lanterns of Ido" (after all the stories of the marginalized I found myself without patience to read the details of the vacay time of the island's yuppies).
(Thanks Missy for telling me to read this! I still believe you should do book-recommending professionally!)