| Before I became a high school senior, I had never scored above 90 on Korean language / verbal section exams. I think I first crossed 90 in October of my senior year. That was probably the first time I gained some conviction of my own about what it means to understand a text. Namely, that you can only understand it if you accept not simply 'the framework of my own thinking,' but the framework of new knowledge as well. From this point, I think I myself 'grew' a bit more. This time the novel 'The Beijing Letter' was a bit different. This one departed even further from the framework of new 'knowledge,' so I'd have to call it the so-called 'OMG' (oh my god). First, this novel is full of 'fiction.' Of course, any novel's main content is fiction based on reality, but here a 'fictional' protagonist writes out a fictional story in letters. And not a story of his own country, but a story of China. I too have traveled in China, but I didn't move around to so many places. I didn't have much money, and from the start my style is to stay in one place for a long time and try to see as much as I can there, rather than wandering around to many places like this. But setting aside my travel style, the author Tilman Rammstedt's expression was truly delicate. As if expressing things he had directly seen and experienced himself, he used very beautiful expressions. In that respect, while reading this novel I thought the author was someone who expresses things extremely well, and I assumed he was someone who had traveled to China, but when I heard he just wrote it after reading a single book, he could only seem all the more remarkable. Of course, because of the nature of the 'letter' medium there's a limit to length, so the expression too is written keeping mainly to the concise yet clean, which may be why it feels this way, but in any case his expressive ability was tremendous. Looking at it from the angle of relationships between characters, the protagonist Keith and his grandfather didn't seem to be on close terms. At least as I see it, it seems that in childhood Keith didn't dislike his grandfather's existence and thought of him as someone who lavished attention on him. But at some point, from when Keith's identity and his own thought structure began to take shape, it seems a sense of burden and antipathy toward his grandfather arose. This is probably one of the feelings of Keith, having become an adult, wanting to break away from his grandfather. In other words, 'independence,' and since my own desire to 'become independent' from my parents is so strong, I can understand his feelings a little. Looking at the way the grandfather speaks to Keith, it's true he certainly had affection, but as this became coercion and command, he naturally would have felt burdened and wanted to avoid it. Something a bit tragic is the 'setup' in which Franziska, who appeared as the grandfather's girlfriend/lover, and Keith later come to like each other. I thought this setup was very worldly, conventional, and a commonly seen setup. Of course, the relationship of 'the grandfather's lover' and the grandson is a bit much, but from this woman's standpoint too, while the grandfather is attractive, she probably would have preferred 'Keith,' the younger blood. Another 'tragedy' is the scene where Keith, even after seeing the grandfather's corpse, says it isn't the grandfather. Hmm.... in a way, should I say this brings to mind society's problem of 'human alienation'??? Europe is a thoroughly individualistic society, so it's all the more so, but it also seems to be because once you're merely an 'adult,' you have to take responsibility for your own life. That once you become an adult, you're tied by 'blood' but are thoroughly strangers. Since this atmosphere pervades the whole novel, Keith and the other children seem not to regard the grandfather all that favorably. (Though part of it is that he lived a long time.) Honestly, I can't believe this novel won an award, but well, what can you do, that was the judges' opinion, and I just differed a little in opinion from those people. It was certainly attractive, but on the other hand it was a novel that left a bitter aftertaste. |
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