The Naked Tree

Starred review from June 26, 2023
This adaptation by Eisner Award winner Gendry-Kim (The Waiting) of a seminal Korean novel by Park Wan-Suh possesses a rare power. Twenty-year-old Lee Kyeonga navigates 1950s Seoul, which is under siege by the North Korean army. Cynical and guarded, she lives with her mother and works at the Post Exchange, where she butters up American GIs so they’ll buy portraits of themselves painted on handkerchiefs. Gendry-Kim breathes life into this milieu in just a handful of striking panels, as Kyeonga convinces a vain saleswoman to write love letters in English to her American beau, develops an uncomfortable crush on a married portrait painter, and reels from an encounter with a GI who promises to “liberate” her in his hotel room. These fraught episodic vignettes are weighted by Kyeonga’s desperation to free herself from guilt and grief over the deaths of her two brothers in a bombing. “How could the Gods be so cruel?” Kyeonga recalls her mother crying out, “How could they take both my boys and leave only the girl behind?” Gendry-Kim brings this trauma full-force to her pages in bold, brushy inkwork, proving yet again that she’s an essential voice in global comics. It’s a masterful and devastating portrait of the lasting cruelties of wartime. Agent: Nicolas Grivel, Nicolas Grivel Agency.

Starred review from July 14, 2023

Lee Kyeonga, a young woman living with her taciturn mother in Seoul during the Korean War, does her best to get by. She works in an American Military Post Exchange, managing a team of amateur painters who create portraits on handkerchiefs for soldiers to buy as souvenirs. When a moody, mysterious young man joins their team, she's taken with his talent and his barely concealed melancholy. A tenuous friendship between the pair offers a glimpse of life beyond her purgatorial day-to-day, if only in that she's able to form a connection to someone else's existential dis-ease. So much of this flowing, poetic graphic novel remains unspoken, an impossible longing for escape--from wartime, from economic paralysis, from a home haunted by a family tragedy hinted at and ultimately gut-wrenchingly revealed in the book's final act, from a young adulthood empty of romantic love. Gendry-Kim's (The Waiting) expert translation, from the original novel penned in 1970 to the graphic form, often focuses on simplified faces in tense dialogues, but what lingers are images of small figures plodding through dark, snowy nights and the contours of an empty, echoing family home. VERDICT A murmured wartime memory that speaks volumes about the difficult depths of the solitary human condition.--Emilia Packard

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
Gendry-Kim and Hong are three-for-three in gifting English-reading audiences another sensational author/translator collaboration illuminating a small window into Korean history after Grass (2019) and The Waiting (2021). Gendry-Kim's starkly black-and-white, dynamic panels open with a framing prologue in which a couple discovers the 1969 newspaper announcement of an artist's death, prompting the wife to "carefully . . . coax out the story [she]'d long kept buried in [her] heart." The year is 1951, and the U.S. military occupies Seoul as the Korean Peninsula is cleaving in two. Lee Kyeonga is 20 that fall, working in the American PX building selling portraits hand-painted onto silk scarves--mostly to GIs (lonely and arrogant both). Before the war, Kyeonga was an English literature student at unparalleled Ewha Womans University; her near-fluency now enables her to be the conduit between demanding customers and not-so-fine artists. When a reticent, accomplished painter joins the team, Kyeonga becomes enamored with him even as she realizes he has a wife and young children. Her longing becomes an escape, especially from a troubled past haunted by devastating tragedy and loss. Gendry-Kim's emotional author's note at story's end reveals that she's adapted (and deviated slightly) from the original novel of the same name by the late Park Wan-suh, one of Korea's leading historical writers. Gendry-Kim's work, as always, remains uniquely her own--immersive, potent, enduring.

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