Book: The Hive and the Honey: Stories

Author: Paul Yoon

Published by: Scribner

Price: Rs 599

"I’m always writing in response to something,” the American writer, Paul Yoon, noted in an interview while discussing his novel, Run Me to Earth. Even a cursory examination of Yoon’s oeuvre is enough to conclude what that “something” is — it’s the intergenerational and transgenerational trauma of war, displacement, and migration.

Bearing impressions of themes from his past works, this collection of seven fascinating stories cements his position as that of someone who peoples his fiction with profound absences.

Hyper-focusing on the mundane reality of its protagonist(s) as they try to negotiate their everyday life without remaining unaffected by the gnawing presence of their past, Yoon’s characters are stripped of any desire to introduce meaning and value to their lives. They question the skewed and privileged paradigms of looking at a story as they tread on unexpected — and unthinkable — trajectories, resulting in a profound exploration of grief, ennui, and placelessness.

The collection’s first story, "Bosun", reminds one of Manoranjan Byapari’s fiction that is peppered with prison experiences. The titular character notes something that Byapari repeats often: “There were days when Bo convinced himself that his time in the correctional facility wasn’t so bad.”

As the story progresses, it appears that the protagonist is deliberately loosening his grip on the world as there’s nothing that tethers him, making him wonder “the last time he had felt a longing” for anything. Until he meets Caro, and is suddenly convinced that *“something great was going to happen to him, maybe not tonight or tomorrow, but soon.”

"Komarov" studies the stains of grief in a woman’s life. She is tasked to spy on a boxer who could be his son. The ending leaves one in awe of Yoon’s trademark literary style: its suffocatingly economical and idiosyncratic rendition of a range of human experiences.

In the Acknowledgements, Yoon pays respects to works by authors who inspired the titular story and "At the Post Station". The former carries psychic impressions of Japanese colonisation, while military supremacy, historical influences, and cross-cultural exchanges in the Edo period are subliminally depicted in the latter.

"Cromer" is an expert exploration of everything that’s seemingly familial yet estranged. Sample what Harry ruminates as he watches his partner, Grace, sleep: “What was she dreaming of? What lives did she live these days, or hope to live, that she didn’t tell him about?” "Person of Korea" comes closest to underlining the modern-day dilemma: of locating oneself in a globalised world where one feels constantly Othered.

"Valley of the Moon" is the most disturbing and distinctly charming. It features the thirty-one-year-old, Tongsu, returning from war to his hometown to build a quiet life. Near the small farmhouse where “he had been born and where his parents had most likely died”, he sees “the bones of animals, some of them likely belonging to the goats that used to roam here, and he wasn’t sure why but he spent the rest of the day gathering them, the bones, even before he stepped inside.” The story takes sharp turns as a murder takes place and an opportunity to father two orphans features later. But fundamentally, it’s a narrative of inheritance, of a return that’s available to only a few.

Yoon masterfully chronicles this very theme in this collection.