Young Insu grows up in the chaotic streets of Pupyong, among black marketeers, prostitutes, and castoff biracial children. Death comes daily to Pupyong through cholera, murder, fatal accidents that are either sad or suspicious and touches Insu's life directly when his beloved aunt commits suicide after being cruelly spurned by her G.I. lover, and his friend James is found drowned in a drain and neighborhood gossips accuse James's mother, whose pursuit of a new blond husband would have been hampered by a half-black son. Although life on the streets is brutal, and the American school Insu attends no better, his Korean family provides him with love and the nourishment of stories and laughter. Like his mother, Insu is attuned to the world of spirits, and he is haunted by the ghost figure of a young boy, a secret half-brother. When Insu learns the true identity of his ghost brother, he also makes a painful discovery about the corrosive prejudices that have torn his family apart.
Brother is a milestone in contemporary literature.
Evocative and compelling, this magnifice nt first novel by a gifted writer captures the mystery, beauty, and pain of a young boy's world. Brother is a wonderfully lyrical and evocative portrait of an extraordinary cultural no-man's land, an area fully claimed by no one's history. This landscape may seem to be surreal, but it is all too human. Brother is luminous, subtle, and eminently readable a pleasure. I detect the ghost brushstrokes of Joan Didion and to borrow a comparison from the world of film Renoir.