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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2023, 384 pages
Paperback:
Dec 2023, 384 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jennifer Hon Khalaf
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A "mesmerizing" (PW, James McBride) "magnificent" (Ha Jin) intergenerational coming-of-age novel set in South Korea—about friendship, belonging, and displacement.
Growing up outside a US military base in South Korea in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Insu—the son of a Korean mother and a German father enlisted in the US Army—spends his days with his "half and half" friends skipping school, selling scavenged Western goods on the black market, watching Hollywood movies, and testing the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. When he hears a legend that water collected in a human skull will cure any sickness, he vows to find some in order to heal his ailing Big Uncle, a geomancer who has been exiled by the family to a mountain cave to die.
Insu's quest takes him and his friends on a sprawling, wild journey into some of South Korea's darkest corners, opening them up to a world beyond their grasp. Meanwhile, Big Uncle has embraced his solitude and fate, and as he recalls his wartime experiences of betrayal and lost love, he attempts to teach his nephew that life is not limited to what we can see—or think we know.
Largely autobiographical and deeply rooted in time and place, Skull Water is the story of a boy coming into his own—and the ways the past continues to haunt the present in a country struggling to confront its troubled history as it moves into modernity.
Excerpt
Skull Water
The shadow of the 707 rippled like a giant black egret as the hilly contours below us became the flat green expanse of the rice paddies around Kimpo Air Base. I could not imagine what power it took to keep these tons of alloy and steel in the air, to keep the plane from plummeting like a stone into the fertile earth below. We were falling at more than two hundred miles an hour, and yet the landscape moved lazily until the plane slowed, just before touching the runway, and then everything seemed to accelerate with a dizzying speed. The world lurched and the air grew suddenly thick with the roar of the jet engines, and we could feel the sudden roughness of the tarmac through the landing gear, right through the bottoms of our seats, as the earth ground itself up into our spines.
As the airplane braked to a near stop, everything outside looked at once too large and yet oddly too small. I glanced over my little sister's head to the aisle seat and saw my mother's eyes ...
Insu comes to realize that simple black-and-white ways of viewing the world — Heaven and Earth, bad and good people, right and wrong acts — can all be inverted, especially when the violent transgressions of war have turned the world upside down. Many novels that explore war are unflinchingly brutal and difficult to read, and Skull Water is no exception when Fenkl writes from Big Uncle's perspective. Yet the novel also explores echoes from the war through previous connections, and memories shared or withheld between families and friends. Skull Water is a particularly complex "war novel" in that it shows not just the events of the Korean War, but also its impact upon a subsequent generation, including racial and cultural collisions...continued
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(Reviewed by Jennifer Hon Khalaf).
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Throughout, the author sustains an otherworldly sense of time and place, and brings to life conceits from Korean folktales...a lovely achievement. Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night
The novel in your hands is something I never knew I'd see, born from things at least two governments hoped to hide. A mixed German Korean boy in 1970s Korea undertakes a quest to save the living with what the dead might know, and he tells us stories across time of this almost-vanished world, and the lives of those thrown away by Korean society and American military forces—his family. Precious, life altering, rebellious, funny, and full of a necessary truth. Ha Jin, author of Waiting
A magnificent novel with a grand vision and assured execution. James McBride, author of Deacon King Kong
This touching book, written with grace, does more than deliver a fresh perspective on a forgotten war. It's proof that the old, peaceful ways defeat the brutality of the new every time, with a blend of spirit, memory, and folklore, some of which is delivered by the magical spirits that walked, and still walk, this earth. We are all the same. We all walk the middle path to get home. I'm so glad that Heinz Insu Fenkl shows us how to get there.
The novel Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl is divided between the experiences of the character Big Uncle during the Korean War in 1950 and his nephew Insu's adolescence in the 1970s. It shows how alliances and protections formed during the war gave rise to familial ties and cultural integrations in the postwar era. Insu's identity as the son of a German-American military father and Korean mother reflects the enduring impact of the United States' involvement in Korea.
The Korean War was a proxy war for larger powers' overarching grabs for geopolitical power within the Cold War. These maneuvers led to a bloody and devastating conflict from 1950 to 1953, in which about 70% of deaths were those of civilians. Subsequent to Japan's defeat ...
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