Challenging, occasionally forced and turgid, but energized by a powerful sense of the difficulty of “belonging” in a...
A spy living a fabricated life as a respectable businessman, husband and father is the embattled protagonist of this ambitious novel from one of Korea’s most admired writers.
We quickly learn that Kim Ki-Yong, an importer of foreign films living in Seoul, was in fact born in North Korea, where he was trained as a spy and sent to South Korea to lay the groundwork for more “agents” like himself to infiltrate the territory pronounced disloyal to increasingly megalomaniacal dictator Kim Jong-il. But Young-Ha Kim (I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, 2007) has even bigger fish to fry, in a subtly layered structure of emotionally complex parallel stories. Disregarding an e-mail message that orders him to “return immediately” to North Korea, Kim Ki-Yong scrambles to stay a step ahead of fellow agents watching (and closing in on?) him while attempting to calm the women who do and do not love him. These are his wife Ma-ri, aging ungracefully and entangled in a bitter affair with a calculating younger man; his mistress Soji, who’s the first to sense the full extent of his remoteness and detachment (“It always seemed you weren’t really from here”); and his adolescent daughter Hyon-mi, a “stellar student” and expert player of the classic game Go, whose inchoate relationship with a male classmate subtly parallels both her parents’ erotic misadventures. On another level, Kim’s secrets and demons are contrasted with those of the allies, observers and enemies who will determine the shape of his ever-narrowing future. This intense novel’s bristling plot—confined to the events of a single day—ironically echoes that of Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, in the experiences of Kim (Leopold Bloom), Ma-ri (his wife Molly) and Hyon-mi (Leopold’s ideal “son” Stephen Dedalus).
Challenging, occasionally forced and turgid, but energized by a powerful sense of the difficulty of “belonging” in a dangerous place and time. Perhaps the most intriguing and accomplished Korean fiction yet to appear in English translation.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-15-101545-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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