Doesn’t all our greatest art address the subject of death—its cruelty, its inevitability? The shadow it casts on our all too brief lives? “What does it all mean?” we ask ourselves.
Allow me to tell you: death means that the dinner reservation you made for a party of seven needs to be upped to ten, then lowered to nine, and then upped again, this time to fourteen. Eighteen will ultimately show up, so you will have to sit with people you just vaguely remember at a four-top on the other side of the room, listening as the fun table, the one with your sparkling sister at it, laughs and laughs. Or perhaps you’re all together but not getting your main courses because the chef, who should be in the kitchen, cooking, is getting dressed down by your brother-in-law, who did not care for the soup. Or maybe your party has been split into six groups of three, or three groups of six. While the specifics blur together, there will remain one constant, which is you, having to hear things like “Well, I know that your father did his best.”
Several years ago, when I was quivering at the top of a rock-climbing wall, the instructor called up to me: “You just have to let go and the auto-belay will catch you. Just let yourself fall.” I peered down at the empty space below. Absolutely not, I thought.
I climbed all the way back down, grazing the tips of my fingers on the rough hand holds. The instructor shook his head and grinned. I stomped off, embarrassed. I was never good at falling. What I was good at was holding on. Keeping it together, at any cost. The ease of the fall terrified me. Absolutely not.
It’s rare that I finish a book and find myself at a loss as to how to review it, but here we are with Angela Mi Young Hur’s sophomore novel Folklorn. Ostensibly, it is a novel about the daughter of immigrants trying to solve the mystery of what happened to her sister, but it is so much more than that. So, so, so much more. Genre-defying and emotionally unsettling, it is a book that refuses to stay in whatever category the reader wants to put it.
Your mother enters the poem
with her sadness intact.
When your mother enters
the poem, should she be