'Pachinko' by Min Jin Lee.
Pachinko, the epic novel by Korean-American novelist Min Jin Lee,is a family and national saga that presents that fraction of Koreans who found themselves living among the Japanese.
Running from before World War I to 1989,it is an intergenerational narrative with the unputdownable quality of soap plus the satisfactions of prose that can disclose realities and a set of interconnected stories that mirror the movement of history.
IsPachinko a masterpiece? No. But it is one of those books that takes a mighty bite of big-time subject matter and has its own kind of grandeur.
Min Jin Lee uses the individual life,not the world-historical one,but then shows how the one impacts on the other. Her novel is grandly conceived and bristles with intelligence and ambition. Two quotations brood over it. The first from Dickens:"Home is a name,a word,it is a strong one;stronger than magician ever spoke,or spirit answered to,in strongest conjuration."
The second,from Benedict Anderson about a nation as"an imagined political community … imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members … yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."
This is clever stuff and makes for a long haunting novel about Korean exile and Japanese repression.
I read the first half wondering if this was a Tolstoyan recapitulation of how the Koreans become the day labourers and chattels of the Japanese and then the second at speed.