Book Reviews 63
Devine, Maija Rhee. The Voices of Heaven. Irvine, CA: Seoul Selection, 2013. 316 pages, $16.00 Reviewed by John J. Han As an author of a book, Maija Rhee Devine, a Korean-American writer, is a late bloomer. She came to the United States in the 1960s and worked on her novel, The Voices of Heaven, for fifteen years before it was published this year, alongside her poetry chapbook Long Walks on Short Days (Finishing Line Press). Before the publication of her books, however, a number of her prose works and poems appeared in national journals such as Michigan Quarterly Review, Boulevard, North American Review, and The Kenyon Review. The publication of two book-length works heightens her profile nationally and internationally. According to the author’s recent conversation with this reviewer, The Voices of Heaven began as a memoir and ended as a novel. Like James Joyce’s A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist, many of the characters and events derive from the author’s own life. Similar to Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who leaves Ireland for Continental Europe, Rhee’s main character, Mi-na, leaves South Korea for the United States. Both characters find their respective native cultures stifling—the Irish culture dominated by Catholicism and the Korean culture by Confucianism. Both characters reach their full potential on foreign soil. The majority of the story focuses on the events from the late 1940s to 1960. After 36 years of Japanese colonial rule, Koreans achieved national liberation in 1945, but their jubilation was short-lived as the country was divided into two parts: the pro-Soviet North and the pro-American South. Hostilities between the two sides culminated in the Korean War (1950-53), which claimed the lives of 415,000 South Koreans, 36,574 Americans, and 1.5 million North Koreans and Chinese. Devine’s novel portrays, in graphic detail, the hardships Koreans suffered during this time—the hardships the author must have experienced personally. The Voices of Heaven reflects the author’s anticommunist sentiment and her gratitude toward America for defending South Korea against North Korean aggression. The novel’s point of view constantly shifts, and the main characters’ names are used as subheadings. (Nicholas Sparks uses a similar structure in his novel The Lucky One.) This allows us to enter the mind of each character. As the story opens, we encounter a family in Seoul which consists of Gui-yong (a truck diver), Eum-chun (his wife), Mi-na (their adopted daughter), and Gui-yong’s mother. Gui-yong and Eum-chun are a loving couple. The problem is that they do not have a son. Gui-yong’s mother forces him to get a concubine so that they can have a son who will inherit the family name. With much reluctance, Guiyong secures a concubine, Soo-yang. Soo-yang lives with Gui-yong and his wife under the same roof. Although broken-hearted, Eum-chun learns to accept her “fate” as a barren woman. Sooyang bears a son to the delight of Gui-yong’s mother, who now feels ready to die anytime, having fulfilled her sacred duty to secure a baby boy for the family.