“A poignant and impressive debut… Strongly imagined, well-paced, and written with an eloquently restrained lyricism that conveys the subtleties of feelings as well as the harshness of facts.”
“Having existed in silence for so long, once spoken the story of the Korean ‘comfort women’ immediately becomes mythic, heroic, and redemptive. This is not a novel about pity or hate, but rather one of strength and love.”
“A striking debut by a strongly gifted writer…. This impressive first novel depicts the atrocities of war and its lingering effects on a later generation. An intense study of a mother-daughter relationship… piercing and moving in its evocation of feminine closeness…. Akiko’s flashbacks to her haunted past and Beccah’s account of their lives together are told alternately, and it is one of Keller’s several triumphs that she is able to render the two worlds so powerfully and distinctly.”
“Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman strikes a pure note, humming its passages under your skin like a river of memory long after the book has been closed.”
“Unusual and very special…. This mesmerizing, intimate book ranges from Korean folk culture to the lives of women, to immigrants adapting to America, to Christian missionaries in Asia… Keller’s blend of lyricism and fury makes Comfort Woman haunting.”
“The water in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman bathes her readers in an aqueous, musical prose. With intense lyrical fusion, Keller finds abundance in her Hawai’i and her Korea as she brings the Yalu River to a stream behind a house in Honolulu in this novel brilliant in hues of indelible blue.”
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Copyright
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL. England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1997
Published in Penguin Books 1998
Copyright © Nora Okja Keller, 1997
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which portions of this book, in slightly different form, first appeared: Bamboo Ridge, Into the Fire: Asian American Prose, edited by Sylvia Watanabe and Carol Bruchac, Greenfield Review Literary Center, Incorporated; On a Bed of Rice; An Asian American Erotic Feast, edited by Geraldine Kudaka, Anchor Books; The Pushcart Prize XX, edited by Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize editors, Pushcart Press; and Writing Away Here.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN : 978-1-101-12767-4