Once the Shore

Once the Shore by Paul Yoon, reviewed by Matthew Salesses

Paul Yoon’s remarkable debut collection, Once the Shore, is a study in character. These eight stories populate the reader’s mind with men and women who could exist anywhere, yet nowhere except the book’s fictitious South Korean island, Solla. The language, setting, and action serve to deepen character, to reveal the context of, and longing in, these unique lives. Through a strong and consistent third-person narrator, we step into the world of a Korean sea woman, a girl with a limp, a girl haunted by the past and disease, a man reconfiguring his memories of marriage. We learn where these people came from, and we attach ourselves to their desires, which carry the stories forward.

The title story, “Once the Shore,” which appeared in One Story and The Best American Short Stories 2006, opens the book; however, I found myself most pleasurably sinking into the middle, longer, stories, such as “Faces to the Fires” and “The Woodcarver’s Daughter.” In the former, a man the woman protagonist once knew-and loved-returns to town, providing the perfect opportunity to delve into their past, a past of fire and just off-screen danger. The man brings trouble with him, like a shadow, but the focus is on what his character-his presence and prior long absence-reveals about her, a side of her she never was able to express. In the latter story, the tension of the war, of Americans looking for a deserter who has taken up residence in a small Korean town, again sets a backdrop of danger. This time it injects a sense of urgency into the discovery of who this girl is, really is, a discovery the deserter and reader share.

The decision to change the setting of these stories from the real Jeju Island to the fictional Solla Island, I think was a wise one, as it dampened the doubting critic inside me, the part of me that felt the need, at times, to question and confirm cultural and geographical idiosyncrasies, as an occasional resident of Korea. This is a world of fiction, a world created, a world meant to serve its characters. And in this respect, it truly delivers.

Once the Shore by Paul Yoon

Sarabande Books, 2009, 269 pages, $15.95