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Whenever I set out to write a novel, I usually have a definite idea for the title, one that is designed to be both evocative and informative of the kind of story it is going to tell. I have a special love for long and complicated titles, like Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. But this novel was unusual in that the original title I had, Return to Four Verdant Mothers, was not one that I was particularly in love with. It was an apt one in the sense that the fictional mountain known as Four Verdant Mothers plays a central role in the narrative, symbolizing home, peace, and innocence as well as escape, to which the myriad characters of the novel are trying to get back to. But my agent thought it might be too mysterious for prospective readers, so he suggested The Melancholy of Untold History, a phrase that my historian character utters, which I loved. It points to the millennia-long span of the novel as well as its concern with telling stories of people who have been left out of mainstream historical narratives. And all my characters, living in vastly different points in time, are dealing with the melancholy of being lost in one way or another. So I...[read on]
The Page 99 Test: Sublime Dreams of Living Machines.
Q&A with Minsoo Kang.
--Marshal Zeringue
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