The Forsaken Hills A Novel of the Korean War

The item If you leave me: This item is available to borrow from 1 library branch. Creator Kim, Crystal Hana, Author Kim, Crystal Hana, Summary An emotionally riveting debut novel about war, family, and forbidden love, the unforgettable saga of two ill-fated lovers in Korea and the heartbreaking choices they're forced to make in the years surrounding the civil war that still haunts us today.

When the communist-backed army from the north invades her home, sixteen-year-old Haemi Lee, along with her widowed mother and ailing brother, is forced to flee to a refugee camp along the coast.

R.L. Lahr (Author of The Forsaken Hills A Novel of the Korean War)

For a few hours each night, she escapes her family's makeshift home and tragic circumstances with her childhood friend, Kyunghwan. Focused on finishing school, Kyunghwan doesn't realize his older and wealthier cousin, Jisoo, has his sights set on the beautiful and spirited Haemi, and is determined to marry her before joining the fight. But as Haemi becomes a wife, then a mother, her decision to forsake the boy she always loved for the security of her family sets off a dramatic saga that will have profound effects for generations to come.

Richly told and deeply moving, If You Leave Me is a stunning portrait of war and refugee life, a passionate and timeless romance, and a heartrending exploration of one woman's longing for autonomy in a rapidly changing world. Label If you leave me: Library Locations Map Details. I had seen its flat ruins. They might not save me, though I swore to myself they would.

I knew I was different, if nothing else marked by my name. I acted always from two necessities; the first was to be like everyone, and the second—was it foolish? If I was to be despised I wanted it to be by inferiors. In , he volunteered for a fighter wing and was sent to Korea, which was then at war.

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For several months, he operated at the tip of the spear, flying jets above the frozen 38th parallel, waste places and factories, the Yalu curving toward the Yellow Sea. It gave him a real-world credibility that would eventually make him an oddball in the literary world, where no one does anything but go to parties, read, and write. He led squadrons, flew as a wingman, tumbling through the sky, chasing the Russian MiGs that howled from the north.

But there still was a sliver of the old poem-saturated Horowitz, dreaming of the perfect phrase. His first novel, The Hunters, was a story of American pilots in Korea. Fly all day; report all night. The book appeared under the name James Salter in He later described the pseudonym as a necessary precaution. I wanted to be admired but not known.

Even after death it keeps its power; even half-buried in newsprint or dirt, something catches the eye. Salter suffered from a disease diagnosed by the early Zionists, for whom a Jewish nation—what if Horowitz had been flying a Mirage over Sinai instead of an F over the Yalu? Simply put, Salter believed what they told him at West Point—about the world and about himself. He internalized it, then shaped himself around this conception. If he wanted to be a great pilot and a great American writer, he could not do it named Horowitz.

Perhaps surprisingly , this internal conflict does not weaken Salter as a writer but deepens and complicates him. In this, he is akin to Isaac Babel, the great writer of the Russian revolution, a Jew who rode with the Cossacks in the war between the Reds and the Whites. The white neck was spread out in the dung, and the wings began to move above the slaughtered bird. Never looking at me, absorbed by the instruments in front of him and by something in his thoughts, sometimes watching the world of dark forest that swept beneath us, hills and frozen lakes, he was gauging my desire to belong.

It was a baptism. This silent angel was to bring me to the place where, wet and subdued, I would be made one with the rest. Afterwards he said not a word to me. The emissary does not stoop to banter. He performs his duty, gathers his things, and is gone. But the snowy fields pouring past beneath us, the terror, the feeling of being for a moment a true pilot—these things remained. One should note the term baptism: And you sit and eat the goose with the Cossacks. For Babel, it was from horseback, an unusual position for a Jew. We were going home with new airplanes, the first of those that could routinely fly faster than the speed of sound.

T he Hunters was a hit. It sold and sold. It was purchased by Hollywood, where it was turned into a film starring Robert Mitchum. Just like that, a new road opened before Salter.

He had been career military, on the Pentagon path. He would forsake all that, go the Hemingway, which was Paris and publication parties and off-season resorts. He made the decision at thirty-two. No matter what else you might think of Salter, you have to acknowledge his bravery: To give up a career of rank and insignia for literature takes guts. He later wrote about wandering the Pentagon, in uniform, looking for someone who would accept his resignation.

Then he went home and cried. In the mids, he began working on the book that would become his artistic breakthrough. Everything is in retrospect, years later, a strange run of towns and restaurants, escapades in bed. Over the crown of western hills we sail beneath a brilliant sky of clouds shot through with sunlight and began the descent to town. And then those great, lineal runs through neighborhoods I knew nothing of, making straight for the perfect square which marked the city like a signet.

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His writing had matured, clipped and beautiful but also a threat. It gets in your head and comes out your mouth.

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The odd comma, the odd beat: It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. Salter is obsessed with light—it pours down, fills up, lingers. In this way, his books are about nothing and about everything. A Sport and a Pastime can be read allegorically. Critics heard an echo of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Henry Miller.

Americans abroad, enraptured by foreign places. Salter is Herzl before Dreyfus, or whatever made him a Zionist, grasping at a mirage, always going but never arriving, always outside, humping through the exile.

The Hunter

If you wear just the right coat, strike just the right pose, assume just the right name. The rain pours down like gravel. In the green light of the instrument panel he feels as homeless, as desolate as a criminal. Gently she wipes his wet cheeks with her fingers. They have nowhere to go. They are strangers here, the doors of the town are closed to them. Suddenly he is filled with intimations of being found somehow, of being seized and taken away. They are lost to each other. The manuscript was rejected by his publisher. It was such a departure.

And it was boring. And it was about nothing. And it was pornographic. It was then turned down by just about every other publishing house in New York, until it was finally put out by George Plimpton and The Paris Review. The ensuing trajectory of the novel describes the arc dreamed of by every author whose book has tanked: Three hundred copies sold the first year, three thousand sold the second, ten thousand the third, and so on. In , it was republished by the Modern Library, a rare honor.

Yet he goes on, page by page, a man with a message he knows will prevail in the end. He was living in New City, a suburb on the Hudson a few dozen miles above Manhattan. The novel tells the story of a seemingly perfect marriage as it comes apart. People age before your eyes, collapse like old houses, give up the ghost before they die. The book is a perfect example of the Salter aesthetic: