8 LIVES OF A CENTURY-OLD TRICKSTER

A North Korean woman recounts a dramatic and traumatic life.

The protagonist and occasional narrator of Lee’s smart, complex debut contains multitudes. Asked by a writer to describe herself, she responds: “Slave. Escape-artist. Murderer. Terrorist. Spy. Lover. And Mother.” In the pages that follow, she describes all those roles and more. During her childhood she poisons her violently abusive father. During World War II she’s taken by the Japanese army and sent to a “Comfort Station” in Indonesia where she and others are routinely raped by soldiers. During the Korean War she translates for U.S. troops whom she is eventually determined to undermine. After the war she settles into a more comfortable life in Pyongyang, but her survival skills make her both insular and an expert at deception—a perfect temperament for a spy, which is a gift (and burden) she passes on to her daughter. Though Lee jumbles the timeline somewhat, it’s clear that the trickster of the title has had to develop a Scheherazade-like talent as a storyteller and deceiver as survival tactics, and Lee’s style echoes the cool, unaffected delivery of someone who’s seen it all. The narrator is defiantly proud, for instance, in describing her childhood habit of eating dirt: “I savored its taste, its tang and texture that are like no other in this world.” But as her daughter, Mihee, claims more of the story in the novel’s later pages, it’s clear that a lifetime of abuse and deceit took a serious toll. Mihee has inherited her mother’s wit and capacity to change personas as easily as clothing, but it means swallowing tyrannical treatment from men and the state, and Lee’s understated approach puts the damage in clearer relief.

An inventive, melancholy debut.