Mater 2-10

"Yes, it’s a big, ambitious novel by one of Korea’s most established writers. Hwang Sok-yong, at 81, is the oldest author on our shortlist. Mater 2-10 is his ninth book to be translated into English. It’s also the third year running that there has been a Korean book on the shortlist. He himself was longlisted in 2019 and has been awarded Korea’s highest literary prizes. He’s very political and socially committed. Back in 1993, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for an unauthorised trip to North Korea to promote exchange between artists of the two Koreas. He was released on special pardon after five years when a new president was elected. Mater 2-10 refers to a locomotive that was captured during the Korean War by the South Korean army as they advanced north. In 1950, the American army destroyed it to keep it out of enemy hands. Then, in the early 2000s, it was restored and became an icon of the Korean War, and the division of the country. As Hwang Sok-yong puts it in his author’s note: “Like a mummy in a tomb, Mater 2-10 has been chemically preserved and turned into a commemorative fossil of the age of division.” It’s an epic story, as you said. It threads together three generations of railroad workers over a century of Korean history, a complicated national history of occupation and freedom, alongside the political struggles of the working class. The terrific opening I was referring to is where we meet a laid-off railroad worker staging a protest on top of a 16-storey factory chimney. It’s like something out of Italo Calvino— The Baron in the Trees , you know? He’s up there for what turns out to be more than a year, during which time there are flashbacks to his ancestors, and the sort of hallucinatory conversations he has. It gives us, the readers, a sense of Korea’s 20th-century history, with a focus on stories of oppression during the Japanese colonial period from 1910 to 1945, revolving around two of his relatives—his grandfather and his great uncle—who come to represent opposing responses to occupation: resistance or collaboration. Hwang Sok-yong says his aim was to plug a gap in Korean fiction, which typically reduces industrial workers to historical specks of dust. The Booker Foundation did a survey of British readers, and found that the highest percentage of translated books are Japanese. This is not something I’ve noticed, personally. Certainly, South Korea punches above its weight in almost every respect—not only in terms of literature, but in film, music, television, and culture more generally. It’s quite extraordinary. There are other areas as well. It’s difficult to generalise in terms of Latin America, because there are more than thirty countries, but this year we did have strong Latin American representation, with four titles on the longlist."