This is an absolutely beautiful novel. It is a story comprising interconnected stories - part myth, part fictional history and part a contemporary tale of love, loss and coping. The story begins with a Storyteller who has been imprisoned in a dungeon and knows he is doomed to die when he is suddenly summoned from the depths of the gaol to entertain the Emperor with one last story. We then learn about the four divine inhabitants of the Four Verdant Mountains. The two Gods and two Goddesses are best of friends until they encounter the purple cloud of discord. This discord and the resultant strife is a recurring theme throughout the novel. It has the effect of heaping untold miseries on connected and unconnected persons through centuries. The third story line is 2000 years later in the present day where an eminent historian has lost his wife and finds comfort in the company of his young colleague. The book did start out as being confusing especially when the stories switch back and forth among the three narratives. However, as you proceed, the author deftly weaves it all together. I loved the references to Eastern myths and legends as also deep-rooted beliefs in the supernatural and the concepts of reincarnation, rebirth, divine intervention and Karma. I also loved how the present-day historian section highlights the concepts of erasure of history, manipulation of history and fabrication of history to suit the narrative of the people in power or rather the ones writing it. This is not a book for everyone and will have its fair share of love and hate. As the book blurb references, just like Cloud Cuckoo Land which was also a book I loved. I am definitely one of those who loved it and waiting for more from the author.
Thank You Netgalley, William Morrow and Minsoo Kang for the ARC

Minsoo Kang’s THE MELANCHOLY OF UNTOLD HISTORY threads together multiple, seemingly disparate narratives across history, fiction, and storytelling towards a thought-provoking, metafictional end. In the present day, a history professor mourns the death of his wife while contemplating his life’s work: determining the truth of his homeland’s history. But what he finds is that the space between fact and fiction is not always clean cut, and that filling in the holes left behind by untold truth with fiction can be its own form of reparations and healing. The historian’s musings are broken up by narratives of myths, known history, and unknown history. A group of mountain gods play out a whimsical grudge with terrible consequences. Humans fight their terrible battles across generations. A storyteller, sentenced to death, plots his revenge.

MELANCHOLY will not work for everyone—the narration relies heavily on telling, I wish the metafiction aspects were brought forth a bit earlier, and the themes of grief didn’t come through as much as the theoretical, thematic ties. But as a lover of both history and fiction, I’ve always been fascinated by the blurriness between two, and what this blurriness means in the reclamation of marginalized stories. MELANCHOLY left me thinking about just this—how history telling can be warped by the powerful, how it is the responsibility of future generations to both fill in the gaps but also to determine how a truth came to be. Kang is an academic, and it’s clear he knows what he’s writing about. If he ever gives a talk about historiography and the ethics of historical fiction I would be first in line to attend ✋🏻

Thanks to the publisher for the gifted copy!

Enjoyable! It reminded me a bit of Cloud Atlas, a little bit difficult to finish but i felt like it was a great read.

This novel will be great for fans of Cloud Atlas, Cloud Cuckoo Land, The Vanished Birds, and narratives that take place across similar distance & scope. The novel tells two stories in parallel: the first from the prospective of prominent historian grieving the recent death of his wife, and the second speculative history of his homeland across thousands of years and multiple generations. Woven into the tale is the tension between history and myth, as the historian works to uncover historical fabrications in one timeline as stories of gods, monsters, and cycles of reincarnation play out in the other.

This story is heavy on the metafiction, with characters behaving irreverently and offering tongue and cheek perspectives on their story in real time, an explicit indictment of history as a constructed entity built by those with power and influence. The day-to-day of the historian's life and experiences are drastic foil to the more mythologized portions, musing on the relationship between the stories we construct for society and those we construct for ourselves. Both narratives explore grief, forgiveness, and the inescapable human mandate to make meaning of difficult experiences at virtually any cost.

Minsoo Kang’s "The Melancholy of Untold History" offers a unique blend of history, myth, and narrative complexity that makes for an intriguing read, even if it doesn't always hit the mark. The story revolves around a grieving history professor and his young protégé, weaving together their personal journeys with the mythic exploits of four mountain gods and the elusive Storyteller.

The strength of the novel lies in its ambitious scope and Kang’s ability to intertwine various narratives. The exploration of how stories shape our understanding of history and reality is thought-provoking, and the inclusion of East Asian mythology adds a rich, cultural layer to the tale.

However, the novel's complexity can sometimes be its downfall. The multitude of voices and stories within stories can make the plot feel disjointed. While the philosophical musings on grief and the power of narrative are compelling, they occasionally overshadow character development, making it hard to fully connect with the protagonists.

The interactions between the professor and his protégé provide some touching moments, highlighting their shared struggle to find meaning after loss. The mountain gods' witty banter adds humor and a sense of timelessness, contrasting nicely with the more grounded human experiences.

Overall, "The Melancholy of Untold History" is a beautifully written and intellectually stimulating book, but its dense structure and occasional narrative tangents might not be for everyone.

This was a very ambitious book and I enjoyed the writing a lot ! I cant wait to have a physical copy so I can annotate it .

Thank you for the Arc.

The Melancholy of Untold History reveals a people and its individuals who seek to confront the hardships of life through storytelling. Mixing the East Asian mythos with a postmodern approach to standard sci-fi/fantasy narrative tropes, Minsoo Kang has created a challenging, beautiful, sad, humorous, and ultimately unforgettable novel of love, grief, and myth-making.

This was fine. It had potential for greatness, but it was too short and too flat to reach it.

I had a difficult time connecting with this from the outset and was not able to finish it - I think others will enjoy this unconventional narrative, but it was not for me, unfortunately.

Oh boy, when your book gets comped to Babel you know you have big shoes to fill!
Unfortunately, this book did not do that. In fact, I found myself DNF-ing by the 50% mark. I just could not go on. The different timelines were not executed well and I could not find a character to form any sort of attachment to.

I’m very thankful for having received an ARC but I got 20% of the way in and I just could not finish this book. There was nothing really gripping about it and I struggled to get to that 20%.

This book was a DNF. The main character really bothered me and because of that I could barely care about the story at all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really liked the book's initial premise, in where a China-esque country's mythological past, historical past, and present-day each were given their own storylines that quickly intertwined with one another. I also enjoyed the mythological plot and how it blended with the historical elements. Unfortunately, I found the present-day plot to be the weak from its very start, and it made the book the equivalent of an unbalanced three-legged stool. Also, while I applaud Minsoo Kang's creative efforts with the addition of several meta elements, their execution ended up falling a little flat especially at the very end. Overall, I just found "The Melancholy of Untold History" to end up being much less than the sum of all of its initial parts.

From one of my most anticipated reads of 2024 to one of the biggest flops of 2023 with a DNF at 34%, I'm thinking perhaps my expectations were a little too high for "The Melancholy of Untold History". And yet, when a book is marketed with parallels to Babel and Cloud Cuckoo Land, its easy to believe a story is a masterpiece in the making.

The premise of the dual timelines, contrasting between the bygone tale of a storyteller weaving tales to appease his emperor and a historian struggling with the grief of his deceased wife, was promising, but the execution has fallen flat on both fronts.

The tales of the four mythical Mountain deities told by the storyteller is by far the more compelling timeline; I enjoyed the snippets within the stories that showed the storyteller prolonging his enterprise, with lines speaking of future adventures and spin-offs. But the main storyline featuring the gods/goddesses felt immensely rushed; details were glazed over, emotions ran high and fast never to simmer, and the characterization of these characters were rigidly one-dimensional. And unfortunately this was the good part of the story.

For the perspective of the historian, his story was completely saturated in the many flavors of misogyny. From the Pick-Me Boy attitude of "[the historian] [was] not like anyone she had ever dated before....she had never been with someone of such depth", to the poorly written dead wife lauded as the most fantastically fictional "She was...a self-made millionaire who started her own NGO" (for a story written by a historian, it was surprising to see the falsities of self-made millionaires stated as fact, but perhaps the bar for becoming a historian is quite low), to the protégé of the historian who slept with him in his grief because "it was such a natural role for her to play", these chapters were painful to read. The dialogue between characters felt like a vessel for exposition, resulting in heavily clinical language usage and flat character development.

I felt like this book held immense promise but personally the storyteller's tales could've been fleshed out more, the infidelity of the protégé could've been explained as a power imbalance instead of boorish sexism, the grief of the historian could've been expanded further, to start. If there had been tighter editing and maybe some sensitivity readers, I could've seen this book being more. Unfortunately, what it is right now is not worth reading.