Historian, translator and author Minsoo Kang writes heady fiction about storytelling. His short stories often take the form of histories of fantastical places, a mode that allows Kang to worldbuild while reflecting on the motives of the people laying the bricks. In theory, this approach offers a method to explore the ways civilizations and their historians essentially create their pasts. History, as Kang presents it, is less what happened and more what was valued by a particular society or chronicler. But in his debut novel, “The Melancholy of Untold History,” Kang’s elaborate narrative devices are empty and tiring. Reading it feels like chewing a textbook.
Using a scrambled chronology and stories within stories, Kang attempts to stage an epic cyclical history of a war-prone land called the Realm of the Grand Circle. In numbered sections titled “Myth,” “Life” and “History” that jump across time periods, he consciously mixes storytelling modes. “Rather than thinking of myth, history, and ordinary life as strictly discrete categories … consider them as phases in a spectrum in which one way of making sense of a people’s place in the world blends into another,” the book’s unnamed main character, a historian, says in the opening chapter. (Note that, in context, this is said aloud; Kang’s characters speak almost exclusively in flat and unidiomatic walls of text.)
End of carouselThe results of this approach are noticeably artificial. Instead of connecting these eras and their protagonists through characterization, or even causality, Kang repeats phrases, colors and names. The historian, for instance, owns a cat named Radiant Tiger, which is also the name of the animal companion of the Blue Mountain God, who appears in the ancient myths the historian researches. The god is a member of a quartet of chromatic deities who begin the story on a mountain known as Four Verdant Mothers. Their names, blandly, are Yellow Mountain Goddess, Green Mountain Goddess and Red Mountain God, and their progeny as the book unfolds include Yellow Vengeance, Lady Virescent Illumination, Fiery Dedication and, of course, the Radiant Tiger People.
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The most important color turns out to be purple, the hue of a cloud that augurs the millennia-spanning quarrel of the gods and their worshipers. It is also a symbol that epitomizes the flatness of Kang’s storytelling and prose. He introduces it as a “thick purple cloud with red lightning flashing inside,” then uses those descriptors ad nauseam. “There was a thick purple cloud hanging ominously above the mountain with red lightning flashing inside.” “They were followed by a thick cloud of dark purple with red lighting flashing inside it.” “She looked up at the sky and saw through her free-flowing tears a thick cloud of dark purple with red lightning flashing inside.” “They saw a strange purple cloud with red lightning flashing inside.”
The cloud represents a curse on the land surrounding the mountains, so its persistence has a purpose, but the recurring description underscores how thinly Kang depicts historical change. The Realm is curiously static despite its constant upheavals and wars. Kang inundates readers with proper nouns like the Radiant dynasty and Three Golden Dumplings (to say nothing of the inevitable purple cloud) that vaguely link different points on the timeline but that have no ties to a social or material world. As empires rise, fall and repeat, there’s little mention of the foods, fashion or lingo of the Realm. The land has history without culture.
This oversight might be understandable if all the military campaigns and palace intrigue of the myth and history sections offered more to the present than a bricoleur’s toolbox of names and colors, but the life of the unnamed historian is just as stagnant as those of his muses. Though Kang positions him as the protagonist of the book, the character’s chapters are listless and generic. A widower still in mourning, the historian understandably mopes and ruminates, but Kang shades his emotional world with a single tone, insisting on profundity without evoking it. The character variously feels “deep hurt,” “deep sadness” and “deeply sad.” When he stumbles into an affair with a colleague, he holds her “tightly like his life depended on it, like a drowning man on a buoy.” When she hugs him on another occasion, he, you guessed it, lets “out a deep, mournful sigh.” There are emojis with more expressive range.
Kang exhibits some personality in the margins of the text. A deadpan footnote in a history chapter that is formatted as an academic paper refers to a bizarre incident involving the deaths of multiple princes as the “Chestnut-Urine-Donkey Succession Crisis.” And the ominous cloud that kicks off all the bloodshed and kingmaking stems from a dragon’s fart, one of a few bawdy jokes scattered across the novel. But Kang generally writes with the stiff authority of a judge, rarely using language to delight or provoke.
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Even his nods to metafiction, a genre known for playing with form and defying traditions, feel pat. In the closing chapter, he breaks the fourth wall not to rile the reader but to preemptively dispel any doubts about his storytelling. “In the West,” Blue Mountain God says, “it may seem like the author resorted to a gimmicky ending after failing to come up with a more creative way to conclude a complex, multilayered narrative. … But it could also be read as a literary reference to the venerable genre of the dream journey in traditional Eastern fiction.”
Respectfully, Blue Mountain God, I’m just a humble book critic who has never smelled a dragon fart, but when a writer says, I’m not a hack, I’m a scholar, that’s a purple flag.
Stephen Kearse is a critic and author based in Washington. His latest novel is “Liquid Snakes.”
The Melancholy of Untold History
By Minsoo Kang
William Morrow. 228 pp. $28
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