A review of two modern novels that both deal with the theme of a personal odyssey.
This paper presents a review of two novels, both of which use Homer’s ideas in The Odyssey. The first is Mary Piak Lee’s autobiography, “Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America”, in which the author travels to America as a child. The second, Lydia Yuri Minatoya’s odyssey within her memoir, In Talking to High Monks in the Snow: An Asian American Odyssey, is also about finding her place in the world.
Mary Piak Lee’s autobiography, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, is the story of her childhood in career, and her life after she and her parents move to America. Quiet Odyssey begins unassumingly enough as Paik Lee notes, Korea, a small country attached to the northeast of china had been independent for centuries before 1882. She notes that the Japanese takeover of Korea in the early 1900s began a long history of aggression against Korea and created the unhappy world in which the Koreas have lived since 1905. It is in the climate of this political upheaval that Paik Lee’s journey begins. She enjoys a quite life in Korea, with extended family.”