Skull Water: A Novel

(Paperback)

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A 'mesmerizing' (James McBride), 'magnificent' (Ha Jin) intergenerational coming-of-age novel set in South Korea about friendship, belonging, and displacement.

Growing up outside a US military base in South Korea in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Insu the son of a Korean mother and a German father enlisted in the US Army spends his days with his 'half and half' friends skipping school, selling scavenged Western goods on the black market, watching Hollywood movies, and testing the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. When he hears a legend that water collected in a human skull will cure any sickness, he vows to find some in order to heal his ailing Big Uncle, a geomancer who has been exiled by the family to a mountain cave to die.

Insus quest takes him and his friends on a sprawling, wild journey into some of South Koreas darkest corners, opening them up to a world beyond their grasp. Meanwhile, Big Uncle has embraced his solitude and fate, and as he recalls his wartime experiences of betrayal and lost love, he attempts to teach his nephew that life is not limited to what we can see or think we know.

Largely autobiographical and deeply rooted in time and place,Skull Water is the story of a boy coming into his own and the ways the past continues to haunt the present in a country struggling to confront its troubled history as it moves into modernity.

Reviews

"Ambitious and expansive."--New Yorker, The Best Books We Read This Week

"A brilliant novel populated by a wonderful cast of characters and boasting a number of beautifully realized set pieces that will live in the reader's memory."--Booklist(starred review)

"Fenkl returns a quarter century afterMemories of My Ghost Brotherwith a mesmerizing narrative of a boy named Insu, whose mother is Korean and whose father served in the U.S. Army. . . . Throughout, the author sustains an otherworldly sense of time and place, and brings to life conceits from Korean folktales ("Past and future--only the words are different, and if one disposes of them, all things become smooth and easy"). It's a lovely achievement."--Publishers Weekly(starred review)

"A magnificent novel with a grand vision and assured execution."--Ha Jin, author of Waiting

"This is a mesmerizing take on what happens when civil war walks into a nation, leaving scarred humanity in its wake. A fascinating story of a young mixed-race man caught between two cultures, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind. This touching book, written with grace, does more than deliver a fresh perspective on a forgotten war. It's proof that the old, peaceful ways defeat the brutality of the new every time, with a blend of spirit, memory, and folklore, some of which is delivered by the magical spirits that walked, and still walk, this earth. We are all the same. We all walk the middle path to get home. I'm so glad that Heinz Insu Fenkl shows us how to get there."--James McBride, author ofDeacon King Kong

"The novel in your hands is something I never knew I'd see, born from things at least two governments hoped to hide. A mixed German Korean boy in 1970s Korea undertakes a quest to save the living with what the dead might know, and he tells us stories across time ofthis almost- vanished world, and the lives of those thrown away by Korean society and American military forces--his family.Precious, life altering, rebellious, funny, and full of a necessary truth."--Alexander Chee, author ofThe Queen of the Night

"A magical,brutal novelthat shines light into a little-known world of a modernizing Korea of 1970s with its vestiges of American occupation, along with the mysteries of ancestors and the hungry ghosts of worlds we cannot see."--Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author ofThe Evening Hero

"Skull Wateris an amazingly rich mixture, and one it's difficult to classify.If, for instance, I were to think of it as a sort of autofiction, I could compare it toA Childhood--if the boy Harry Crews had needed to operate in both English and Korean and engage in all sorts of complex cultural codeswitching.But the book is also an elegantly structured, multi-stranded work of the imagination, enhanced by some little-known historical elements, and drawing on a deep well of Korean folklore--and extremely rewarding in all of its many dimensions."--Madison Smartt Bell, author ofAll Souls' Rising

"An epic story that is as much about the modernization of Korea as the coming-of-age of its protagonist. ... [T]he novel comes into its own in the second half as it unites narrative power with philosophical musing with spectacular results. A courageous and profound novel."--Kirkus

Author Bio

Born in South Korea to a German father and a Korean mother,Heinz InsuFenklgrew up in Koreauntil he was twelve, and thenin Germany and the U.S.Aprofessor of Englishat SUNY New Paltz,where he teaches creative writing,Asian and Asian American literature,and film, heis also a folklorist, who has edited anthologies of Korean folklore and translated seminal folktales and Buddhist texts.A section ofSkull Waterappeared inThe New Yorker.Fenkllives in New York's Hudson Valley.