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
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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