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ISBN 978-0-9749680-0-1
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ISBN 978-0-9778576-2-3
Three Generations charts the tensions in the Jo family in 1930s Japanese-occupied Seoul. Yom’s keenly observant eye reveals family tensions with profound insight. His characters are so alive that if you cut the pages they might bleed. Delving deeply into each character’s history and beliefs, he illuminates the diverse pressures and impulses driving each one. This Korean classic also brings forth the larger issues at hand, revealing Korea’s situation under Japanese rule, the traditional Korean familial structure, political movements of the 1930s (both national and international), and the battle between the modern and the traditional. Touted as one of Korea’s most important works of fiction, Three Generations gave birth to naturalism in Korean literature. Best representing the Seoul dialect of the time, Yom is celebrated even today for his contributions to Korean literature; Three Generations remains a mandatory read for high school students. The long-awaited publication of this masterpiece in English is a major literary event.
The novel, filled with gossi and family intrigue as scandalous as any contemporary soap opera, reads deliciously like a Dostoevsky novel or Les liaisons dangereuses meets Korea's traditional middle class.
"—KoreAm
With deliberation, precision and quiet power, Yom dissects the relationships and traditions within a family wracked by the constraints of heritage and the impersonal crush of history shifting around it. Yet, Three Generations, mellifluously translated by Yu Young-nan, remains relentlessly intimate, exploring emotions and motives with an unsparing eye, an achievement that establishes Yom as one of the century's seminal novelists.
"—Edward A. Gargan
Through the sorrowful lives of three generations of the Jo family, each caught between desire and social expectation, Three Generations chronicles the interior of the old Seoul way of life of the affluent in 1930s colonial Korea, under siege and about to disappear, just as The Makioka Sisters evokes the vanished bourgeois life of prewar Osaka.
"—JaHyun Kim Haboush
Much of the tragedy of Korea's modern history stems from the fact that the country came under the colonial domination of Japan just as it was undergoing the transition from a feudal to a modern society. Yom's novel does a masterful job of portraying the complexities of this turbulent situation through the lives of three generations of the Jo family.
"—Michael D. Shin