Samuel Park

Four years ago, Samuel Park began working on a novel about love, fate and a disastrous choice set against the backdrop of political unrest. He didn’t use King Lear as a model. He used Brazilian soap operas.

“From the time I was seven to the time I was 14, I watched three hours of soap operas every day,” recalls the congenial Park, 35, the son of South Korean emigrants, who grew up in Brazil and moved to the U.S. when he was 14. “My sense about drama is that everything a character does has to have some kind of impact and has to lead to someone responding in some way, and those shows do that well.”

As does Park’s harrowing, emotionally dense debut, This Burns My Heart (Simon & Schuster, $25), the decade-long saga of a South Korean woman named Soo-Ja whose tumultuous personal life spans an equally tumultuous period in South Korean history. Amid the frenetic midcentury modernization of Seoul and postwar political instability, Soo-Ja copes with the consequences of a single, gargantuan mistake: She marries the wrong man. The book’s plot is an exploration of the consequences, set to the music of sensuous prose.

Early in the novel, Park employs estimable storytelling skills in making Soo-Ja’s choice believable, but it doesn’t take long for either heroine or reader to grow wary. Having ignored the entreaties of soft-spoken medical student Yul and instead chosen Min, a pseudo-revolutionary whose dark side shows itself on their wedding night, Soo-Ja becomes encased in a shell of dread that she will struggle to crack for the rest of her life. Min and his family are not good people. In fact, they’re bad. They’re abusive, unreflective and essentially unchanging.

According to Park, life is like this, too.

“We’re almost too compassionate with evil and bad characters in fiction,” says the Columbia College literature professor. “I feel like there’s no bad people in fiction anymore; everyone has a reason for doing something, everyone has their own story. But some people like power and some people have the choice between being abusive and not, and they decide to be abusive.”

Park sees other advantages in resisting the novelist’s urge to tell every story and instead making room for the heroes and villains of serials, too.

“As a reader, I enjoy getting invested in a character,” he says, “and I think one of the ways you get invested in somebody is when you see things entirely from their perspective, when you’re in an echo chamber of their mind.”

Much of what happens to Soo-Ja grows from her choice to marry Min, although with the passage of time—the book is divided into four parts, each one tracking Soo-Ja’s life in different moments—the black and white divisions Park describes begin to break down, ultimately resulting in a more complicated harmony than you might be able to extract from General Hospital. And throughout, Yul continues to lurk, providing ongoing, albeit muted, hope.

This Burns My Heart is a love story at its core, though, and like all good love stories, it lets go of the ambiguity it’s built when the time is right. The path is long and surprising, the drama is high, there’s pain involved, and the twists and turns are reliably, recognizably and realistically unpredictable.

This Burns My Heart is out now.