by Kang Young-sook ; translated by Kim Boram ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 2015
Timely in an age of refugees and a welcome introduction to a writer worth knowing about.
South Korean novelist Kang turns in a haunting, nervous story of dislocation and disorientation.
Rina is a pimply, disaffected teenage girl whose very name, composed of the Chinese characters meaning “clever” and “beautiful,” promises better things to come. Getting to them, however, means escaping a world of grim factories and barbed wire and making her way across an international border that, though close by, might as well lie on the other side of the world. Finally she departs, crossing hellish landscapes that go on forever, improbably embracing deserts and mountains, to say nothing of factories, brothels, and roads jammed with refugees. If she were to disappear with all those others in flight, Rina reflects, then “no one would even know we were here.” That is just so, though Rina may not be the most trustworthy of narrators to establish a true record of events; she’s never quite sure of where she is, and in any event the goal posts keep shifting in the game: “The country seemed to spread itself out viciously,” writes Kang, “so that no matter how far southwest they traveled, there was no end to it.” It’s possible and even tempting to read this as a story of divided Korea, but Kang, who puts Rina through every nightmare imaginable, including the constant threat of rape, seems to mean something more universal. In this sense, her fraught story of refugees in endless search of sanctuary resembles the work of the German postwar writer Wolfdietrich Schnurre; though Kang admits of the possibility of a happy ending, of finally crossing the border, the suggestion is strong that Rina will keep on moving toward it, “spread out like a blue levee before her,” forever. Discontinuous and sometimes daunting in its strangeness, Kang’s novel offers a postmodern commentary on globalism (“Cheapest is best whether it’s for products or for labor”) and totalitarianism. At times it’s a cousin of Pinocchio, but at others, it’s a Korean rejoinder to The Tin Drum.
Timely in an age of refugees and a welcome introduction to a writer worth knowing about.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-115-6
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
by Kang Young-sook ; translated by Janet Hong
by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by Sally Rooney
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by Sally Rooney
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