A Phantom Childhood: Memories of my Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl [Book Review]

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive on 2010-04-16 00:59Z by Steven

A Phantom Childhood: Memories of my Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl [Book Review]

Korean Quarterly
Spring 1998

Marie Lee

Setting a novel from a child’s point of view can be as risky a venture as, say, writing a novel in dialect. How to wrest an adult meaning from a child’s unformed thoughts? But if the author can pull off such a feat, the rewards are ample, as evidenced by works such as Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Reidar Jönsson’s My Life as a Dog, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (which manages to successfully render both a boy’s point of view and his dialect).

Memories of My Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl should be added to this list. The eponymous narrator, Heinz/Insu is a young boy growing up as an Amerasian in Korea in the ‘60s and early ‘70s…

Read the entire review here.

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