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OBLIVION by Robin Hemley
oblivion
wants “to get off this rock, strap an Acme rocket on her back [and] land in grad school as far away as she [can] get.” Jacob, who is gay, doesn’t see himself as his mother does: “her representative and living proof, her healthy and tall son, of how well they were doing.” When he decides to travel to South Korea to teach English and discover something of his heritage, his parents are delighted, but soon they learn devastating news: Jacob has been arrested for trying to breach the Demilitarized Zone. Back in Hawaii, gossip spreads quickly, the family is shunned, and the restaurant struggles. Jacob, though, is no spy; unwillingly and unwittingly, he has been inhabited by his dead grandfather, who desperately wants to find the family he left behind when he fled North Korea. The ghost sees Jacob as “merely a vessel for his wishes, like how all sons, and grandsons, ought to be.” Excited at being embodied, he is intent on making up “for an afterlife of starvation.” Jacob’s efforts to extricate himself from his selfish “spiritual tumor”—even seeking help from a domineering shaman—test both his strength and hold on reality. Han’s surreal fantasy, sometimes devolving into slapstick, contains a serious critique: of the marginalization of Korean immigrants; of the plight of families separated by a politically contrived border; of shattered lives, pain, and guilt.
A raucous and adroit debut.
OBLIVION An After Autobiography
Hemley, Robin Gold Wake Press (194 pp.) $17.95 paper | June 1, 2022 978-1-63752-781-8
Good news, fiction fans—there’s autofiction, fabulism, literary biography, and even Yiddish theater in the afterlife. “The afterlife, it seemed,” reports the narrator of this book, who is called ________ or sometimes ________ ________ but definitely resembles Hemley himself, “was not unlike the annual Associated Writing Programs
