Republic of Korea and earned his Ph.D. in European History at UCLA. Currently, he is a professor at the history department of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, and the author of a number of history books and short speculative fiction.
Kang's new novel is The Melancholy of Untold History.
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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 am very happy that this is the title I went with at the end.
What's in a name?
I am definitely of the Dickensian/Nabokovian school of thought that names of characters should be both fun and evocative of their natures. But writing a novel that took place in a fictional Asian country presented me with a difficulty as I have always been loathe to use Asian-sounding names that were faux Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. For the chapters of the novel that took place in the premodern era, the easy solution was to take advantage of the fact that names of lofty people in many East Asian countries were chosen for their meanings. So I have two emperors named Veiled Sun and Fiery Dedication, which refer to their characters. But that would seem too traditional in the modern context, so I chose not to use names at all in chapters that take place in the contemporary era, my central character in them known simply as the historian. This is not so far from actual practice in East Asia today in which people are often addressed and referred to by their occupation and rank.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
I think my teenage self would have enjoyed this novel, especially the parts that deal with myth and history. But I don’t know how he would have reacted to the more realist sections that have to do with a middle-aged history professor mourning the death of his wife. I have always been an avid reader of serious literature, and I was already reading novels with heavy themes by Dostoevsky, Hemingway, and Camus in my teens. So the passages on grief, longing, and loneliness would not have been unfamiliar literary material to him. But I think he would have been impatient to get to the more sensational chapters on the war among gods and the rise and fall of dynasties. It’s interesting that I had the reverse experience when I recently read a novel I wrote when I was in my twenties. I was constantly surprised by how different I was back then, and how my worldview changed so much since that time. Even if I had the opportunity to publish that novel now, I would find it difficult to figure out how to update and edit it.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
Endings have always been much easier for me. In fact, I have never begun writing a novel without knowing exactly where it was headed since that gave me direction as well as opportunities to put in presages throughout the narrative. When I get an idea for a novel, the endings come naturally to me – sometimes the idea would come with a conclusion. But I recently had the unusual experience of wanting to write a novel for a few years without being able to figure out the ending. It only came to me a few months ago, so I am finally ready to write it. Beginnings, on the other hand, used to be a source of deep frustration for me. I kept doing this thing where I would begin writing a novel, thinking that I knew how it should start, and write 30-50 pages before realizing that it’s all wrong. And so I would have to start all over. After that happened a number of times, I came to hate it because it felt like it was disrupting the momentum one needs to write an extended narrative. But I realized at some point that that’s part of my process of figuring out what the story is going to be really about and how it is going to be told. So now I don’t particularly mind having to go back to the drawing board after the initial launch.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
Of course all writers endow their main characters with parts of their personalities, experiences, and feelings, but when it comes to my protagonists Ido not write in the autobiographical mode at all. That may be surprising to some readers since the central narrator of The Melancholy of Untold History is a history professor just like myself. But other than our academic careers, our love of history, and our commitment to scholarship, we are very different people. My character lost both of his parents when he was still young, which had a huge impact on the kind of person he became. I suffered no such tragedy, and I led a much more peripatetic life, living in many different countries. I am a rather private person who cannot imagine writing a non-fiction memoir, so writing fiction is a means of dealing with issues and ideas that are of interest to me without revealing myself in a way that would make me feel uncomfortable.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
I am a historian, and I draw a great deal of inspiration from my study of the past, as it will be apparent to readers of this novel. When I am researching history, I am constantly thinking of how differently things could have gone, what would have been the consequences of alternate outcomes, and what that reveals about the vicissitudes of human events. And fiction is the perfect medium with which to pursue such ideas. I am also a big movie buff, though in this golden age of television much of my interest has shifted to quality series on the small screen. From my early studies of cinema and writing of screenplays, I tend to imagine things visually. So I usually have clear ideas of what all my characters look like, the environments they are in, and how actions in the narrative unfold. That has been useful to me creatively, and it has also made the process a lot of fun.
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