The Ginseng Hunter
by Jeff Talarigo (Doubleday, ISBN 9780385517393, $21.95)
I was thrilled to see The Ginseng Hunter come into the
store. Jeff Talarigo's first novel, The Pearl Diver, was a wonderful discovery
and already a favorite. With its fluid time-schemes, vividly poetic
descriptions, and rich characterizations, it reminded me of the novels of Michael
Ondaatje. So I
snatched up The Ginseng Hunter with great excitement. It
did not let me down.
The nameless main
character of The Ginseng Hunter lives alone on a small farm close to
the border between China and North Korea. He spends his spring and summer in
the mountains looking for ginseng roots and tending the farm that will
produce everything he needs to survive a long, bitter winter. It's a
pattern he has held to most of his life. However, as North Korea under the
leadership of The Dear Leader (Kim Jong Il) slips deeper into poverty and
famine, the root hunter finds that the countryside has become a highway for desperate
Koreans who slip across the border looking for food and money. At first he's
leery of them, but after meeting and falling in love with a Korean woman who was sold into
prostitution, he realizes he must do something
to help them.
Talarigo's writing is
confident and delicate. He has an ability to imbue small gestures and
terse dialogue with much more meaning than such spare lines would seem capable of
carrying. Perhaps that's why his two novels are so short: such intricate
work might lose its impact over greater length. That's not a knock
against the book at all, though. In our media-saturated world, a long, dense novel
isn't likely to to reach much more than a book-junky audience. A short
volume like The Ginseng Hunter
is ideal for crossing over the boundary that divides the bookish and the non-bookish.
It offers but few pages to forage through, but much to discover and
enjoy.
Review by
Jason
Quinn Malott, April 17, 2008
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