Heinz Insu Fenkl - Skull Water

February 7, 2023 - Twenty-five years in the making, Heinz Insu Fenkl's ambitious, darkly funny, sweeping novel SKULL WATER is a haunting inter-generational coming-of-age story that grapples with identity and displacement in South Korea in the 1950s and 1970s, and reveals a history both countries would prefer to conceal. Born in South Korea to a German father and a Korean mother, Fenkl grew up in Korea, Germany, and the U.S., and his own experience informs this deeply autobiographical novel.

SKULL WATER is the story of Insu, the son of a Korean mother and a GI father in the U.S. Army, and the intertwined tale of his Korean Big Uncle, who has been exiled to a mountain cave near the family village to die from a gangrenous foot. Growing up near the army base in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Insu and his two best friends, also "half and halfs," spend their days skipping school, selling scavenged Western goods on the black market, and testing the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. When Insu hears an old legend that water collected from a dead person's skull will cure any sickness, he vows to collect some to heal Big Uncle's mysterious injury. His quest takes him and his friends on a sprawling journey into some of South Korea's darkest corners. Meanwhile, Big Uncle, a geomancer uprooted by the Korean War, has embraced his solitude and fate and attempts to teach his nephew that life is not limited to what we can see or think we know.

In his interview with The New Yorker, Fenkl said; "It's a Korean folk belief that stories are meant to be told, and that if one keeps them to oneself and hoards them, there will be terrible consequences."

Join us for a conversation with Heinz Insu Fenkl about his latest book.

For more information, please visit the link below: https://www.koreasociety.org/arts-culture/item/1649-heinz-insu-fenkl-skull-water