[Focus on Author] To Tell Again and Again, Until the Patterns Disappear / Lim Hyeon
The Quarterly Changbi 198, Winter 2022
Abstract
For “Focus on Author,” novelist Lim Hyeon met fellow novelist Jeong Ji A, who has been enthusiastically received by readers with her recent Father’s Liberation Notes (2022). Jeong Ji A had already made waves in our literary world with her 1990 novel Partisans’ Daughter, written using as a motif her former guerrilla parents’ story, which was banned by the National Security Law. Her recent novel Father’s Liberation Notes, a work she wrote 32 years later, vividly depicts the 70-year ordeals of modern Korean history, since its liberation in 1945, while dealing with the present-day death of her father, who suffered a life of hardships due to his socialist activities. This novel became an instant bestseller for its grand scale and engaging story. Lim Hyeon elicits from his conversation with Jeong exciting behind-the-scenes stories about the birth of this work, from the author’s extraordinary childhood memories to the process of representing her father’s real-life stories in a fictional space, and to various motifs about a wide variety of characters.