THE GIRL WHO WROTE LONELINESS

Name: THE GIRL WHO WROTE LONELINESS
Author: Kyung-sook Shin
ISBN: 978-1-60598-863-4

by Kyung-sook Shin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2015

There’s a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age story described as “not quite fact and not quite fiction.”...

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A successful yet troubled South Korean writer looks back on her teenage years and her struggle to work, learn, and survive during "solitary days lived inside an industrial labor genre painting.”

Drawn in part from its author's own experiences, this novel by prizewinner Shin (I’ll Be Right There, 2014, etc.) takes an unsparing look at the near-Victorian working and living conditions suffered in her country during the late 1970s. The unnamed narrator leaves her rural home at age 16 to take a job in an electronics factory in Seoul, where efforts to unionize are resisted by the company at every turn. Her living accommodation is “a lone room” (one of several incantatory phrases in the book), badly heated and ventilated, and shared with several other family members. Money is tight, food is scarce, and the only way to get ahead is to study at night after a full day on the production line. Shin’s unemotional delivery and understated yet devastating perspective on her country’s expectations and norms are familiar from her earlier novels, but this book’s grim glimpse into the lives of factory girls is notably haunting. The narrator is fortunate: she is encouraged by some kind figures, including a teacher who gives her a novel and urges her to write, and she clings to her dream of creativity. Now, however, looking back 16 years later, famous and materially comfortable in a transformed society, the narrator still feels that the wounds of her youth are unhealed, notably those caused by the tragic death of a friend, which “turned me into an infinite blank.” Yet the act of writing this book and the poetic final fugue suggest release and restoration are possible.

There’s a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age story described as “not quite fact and not quite fiction.” Allusive and structurally sophisticated, it melds Shin’s characteristic themes of politics, literature, and painful experience into a mysteriously compelling whole.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-60598-863-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
I WENT TO SEE MY FATHER
by Kyung-sook Shin ; translated by Anton Hur

- BOOK REVIEW
VIOLETS
by Kyung-sook Shin ; translated by Anton Hur

- BOOK REVIEW
I'LL BE RIGHT THERE
by Kyung-sook Shin ; translated by Sora Kim-Russell

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.