Book review: “The Melancholy of Untold History” by Minsoo Kang

Using a chaotic chronology and stories within stories, Kang attempts to stage an epic cyclical history of a war-torn country called the Great Circle Empire. He deliberately mixes narrative modes in numbered sections titled “Myth,” “Life,” and “History” that jump between time periods. “Instead of thinking of myth, history, and ordinary life as strictly separate categories…think of them as phases on a spectrum where one way of understanding a people’s place in the world fades into another,” says the book’s unnamed main character, a historian, in the opening chapter. (Note that this is said out loud in context; Kang’s characters speak almost exclusively in flat and unidiomatic walls of text.)

The results of this approach are strikingly artificial. Rather than linking these eras and their protagonists through characterization or even causality, Kang repeats phrases, colors, and names. The Historian, for example, owns a cat named Radiant Tiger, which is also the name of the animal companion of the Blue Mountain God who appears in the ancient myths the Historian researches. The god is a member of a quarter of chromatic deities whose story begins on a mountain called the Four Verdant Mothers. Their names are, blandly, Yellow Mountain Goddess, Green Mountain Goddess, and Red Mountain God, and their descendants later in the book include Yellow Vengeance, Lady Virescent Illumination, Fiery Dedication, and, of course, the Radiant Tiger People.

The most important color is purple, the shade of a cloud that heralds the millennia-old conflict between the gods and their worshippers. It is also a symbol that embodies the monotony of Kang’s narrative and prose. He introduces it as a “thick purple cloud with red lightning in it” and then uses these descriptions ad nauseam. “Over the mountain hung ominously a thick purple cloud with red lightning flashing in it.” “They were followed by a thick dark purple cloud with red lightning in it.” “She looked up to the sky and saw through her tears a thick dark purple cloud with red lightning in it.” “They saw a strange purple cloud with red lightning in it.”

The cloud represents a curse that lies on the land surrounding the mountains, so its persistence serves a purpose, but the recurring description underscores how superficial Kang’s portrayal of historical change is. The empire is strangely static despite its constant upheaval and wars. Kang inundates readers with proper names like the Radiant Dynasty and the Three Golden Dumplings (not to mention the inevitable purple cloud) that vaguely connect various points on the timeline but have no connection to any social or material world. While empires rise, fall, and repeat themselves, there is little mention of the empire’s foods, fashion, or lingo. The country has history without culture.

This omission would be understandable if all the military campaigns and palace intrigues of the myth and history sections contributed more to the present than a hobbyist’s toolbox of names and colors, but the nameless historian’s life is as stagnant as those of his muses. Although Kang positions him as the book’s protagonist, the character’s chapters are listless and generic. As a widower still grieving, the historian understandably mopes and broods, but Kang drowns out his emotional world with a single tone, insisting on profundity without evoking it. The character alternately feels “deeply hurt,” “deeply sad,” and “profoundly sad.” When he stumbles into an affair with a colleague, he holds on to her “as if his life depended on it, like a drowning man to a buoy.” When she embraces him on another occasion, he lets out, you guessed it, “a deep, sad sigh.” There are emojis with more expressive power.

In the margins of the text, Kang shows some personality. A deadpan footnote in a history chapter formatted as an academic paper refers to a bizarre incident that killed several princes as the “chestnut-urine-donkey succession crisis.” And the ominous cloud that sets off all the bloodshed and the election of a king comes from a dragon fart, one of the few crude jokes scattered throughout the novel. But Kang generally writes with the stiff authority of a judge, rarely using language to delight or provoke.

Even his allusions to metafiction, a genre known for playing with form and defying tradition, seem plausible. In the final chapter, he breaks the fourth wall, not to annoy the reader but to dispel any doubts about his storytelling in advance. “To the West,” says Blue Mountain God, “it might seem as if the author had resorted to a gimmicky ending after failing to think of a more creative way to conclude a complex, multi-layered narrative. … But it could also be read as a literary reference to the venerable genre of the dream journey in traditional Eastern fiction.”

Sincerely, Blue Mountain God, I am just a humble book critic who has never smelled a dragon fart, but when an author says: I am not a scribbler, I am a scholarthis is a purple flag.

Stephen Kearse is a critic and writer based in Washington. His latest novel is Liquid Snakes.

William Morrow. 228 pages. $28