A welcome introduction to a writer of substance hitherto unknown to readers outside Korea.
Assured, thoughtful stories of daily life in modern Korea.
What constitutes a good family? In traditional Korean society, it seems, it must have at its center a woman who has no life other than to serve her husband and children. So it is that, in the opening story of Seo’s octet, a woman already given to self-sacrifice, her husband demanding that she clean up after a covey of messy pigeons that she detests, must contend with ovarian cancer, a flock of white-coated doctors who won’t tell her anything useful, and a useless son who ranges between rage and incomprehension. Seo’s stories find the worm in the apple of ordinary lives, pondering what happens when we examine them too deeply—as, for instance, when a teenage girl begins to spy on her father, certain that he’s having an affair with “Lady Unidentified.” Given that Dad is afraid of insects—“I’m not just talking about disgusting-looking insects like thumb-sized cockroaches and centipedes,” our teenager hastens to add. “He’s afraid of beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, and even butterflies”—it seems uncharacteristically daring of him to contemplate such a fling, and the daughter comes to regret opening the door into his private life. Self-delusion is sometimes to be preferred to self-awareness; when an arrogant doctor becomes a patient, his carefully constructed world comes tumbling down, and he has to decide whether there’s any gain in becoming a better person, even as a writer confronting the meta-fact that “literature may be destined to live on the periphery of society” has to puzzle over whether it’s even worth it to pick up pen and go on. Seo’s stories are plainspoken and uncomplicated and really quite conventional; if there are few surprises in her hard-won revelations that life is hard and ultimately tragic, to say nothing of litigious and bureaucratic, there is plenty of sympathy for humans in all their inglorious, messy condition.
A welcome introduction to a writer of substance hitherto unknown to readers outside Korea.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-118-7
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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