The Melancholy of Untold History
It’s hard to put a label on this playful, moving narrative by a professor of history, but fans of time-hopping historical novels like Cloud Atlas will recognize all the elements they love about the genre in this blend of myth, history, postmodern metafiction, and philosophy.
Minsoo Kang draws on his global travels and deep study of both Eastern and Western history to create a many-layered story-within-a-story that spans millennia, dynasties, and the blurry line between fiction and history. It’s not a doorstop saga, however – this is an elegantly constructed short novel that imagines the consequences of a pre-historical dispute among four heavenly beings and the ways in which the humans that come after replicate that discord in their daily lives. Our anchor to the present moment is a fictional historian who is working through his grief over losing his wife, with the help of a compassionate friend, by trying to find sources for the myths that explain why loss and suffering exist in the world.
Careful readers will recognize myths and folktales from all cultures, but especially those of East Asia, reflected in both the story of the historian’s groundbreaking research, and the narratives he examines. The historian’s present-day world is similar to but not the same as our own, so a layer of historical fantasy overlays the novel’s meditations on how scholars of the past struggle to separate fact from fiction in the documents they study.
This may sound more “meta” than some readers want from a historical novel, but the author’s tone is both humorous and poignant, the stories-within-the-story are rich with adventure and detail, and the guiding philosophy will resonate with any reader who thinks about the difficulty of reconciling one’s past memories with one’s present reality. This is a unique and moving reading experience that I found enchanting.
