Kim opens an intriguing window into modern South Korean society, a slice of the world that is confoundingly different from...
Scenes from the class struggle, Gangnam-style.
Grandpa is convinced that the Japanese, who have not ruled Korea since 1945, are bugging his phone. Pop has taken to calling Grandpa “the old man.” Grandpa is old, of course, born in 1916, but that’s no reason to rub it in—it’s just a sign of the coldness and disrespect that has settled in between the generations. “I’m not trying to make an ethical point here,” insists the protagonist of Kim’s story “The Country Where the Sun Never Rises,” whose day consists of work, sleep, and stopping at the corner store for a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of soju, and a lottery ticket—the cigarettes for Pop, the booze for Grandpa, and the lottery ticket for the young man, desperate for a way out. Kim’s characters are much put upon, long enduring, and discontented no matter what rung of the social ladder they’re on. In “Ninety-Nine Percent,” an ad writer is convinced that he’s seen his well-heeled, abrasive boss somewhere before—but where? Both boss and writer lock into a weird head butting that hinges on the elevation of the Jungfrau, the Swiss alp that speaks volumes about “new market segments that we can explore.” In the world Kim limns, people are commodities, and those who can afford it are slaves to whatever fashion happens to be current; in “The Runner,” a yuppie’s girlfriend turns up “wearing a hoodie and a denim mini-skirt with black knee-socks and expensive, imported running shoes,” guided to her look by a Japanese fashion magazine. So are the Japanese bugging her phone, too? That would be the least of the conflicts that unfold, conflicts on which Kim’s elegant vignettes turn.
Kim opens an intriguing window into modern South Korean society, a slice of the world that is confoundingly different from ours—but also much the same.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-117-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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