“Flower Island” – Review of Hwang Sok-yong’s ‘Familiar Things’

“People live here, just like anywhere else” – hearing this spoken aloud, especially from a mother showing her son their new home, does something strangely familiar. With so little written, so much is said! It burns the mind in uncomfortable ways, without knowing why, or what, is happening exactly.

Small, instinctive turns like this fill the prose of Hwang Sok-yong, most of which slip-by unseen and detached from the impact that they are having. Hwang writes almost in the negative spaces of description – the less he lays out on the page, the closer and more emotional the reader feels. Looking back you think, in puzzlement, ‘what just happened? How did that simple novel, with such understated text, do so much to me?’

It’s not an easy question to answer, and it’s certainly not luck – Hwang has this down to an art now. As Hwang gets older, and his books become thinner (without diminishment), it’s hard to not get the feeling that he could write just about anything, on any topic, no matter how brief, and it would all still feel very meaningful; sitting in the reader’s thoughts for weeks afterwards.

This new home that we are introduced to early, is a place of cardboard and plastic and Styrofoam and linoleum, a place where flies are eaten by the “pint” and everything is a “short trip from bowl to mouth”. An island of “two thousand households” built into “the slopes of the hill”. It’s a slum! On a patch of garbage!

Bugeye – nicknamed as such after a police officer threatened him, “Don’t roll your eyes at me, you bug-eyed little punk! (All of the children are re-christened things like Baldspot or Mole or Toad or Stink Bug or Beetle or Scab) – is moving into one of the shanties with his mother, and into a new job as her assistant. Rubber gloves, pitchfork and collection basket in hand, they filter through the mounds of new trash that arrives each day from the neighbouring city.

“The garbage trucks began to file in”, and the best items are snagged quickly by the crowds of pickers, fighting for the higher-priced recyclables. Bugeye is stationed in the second-line, behind his struggling, yet always capable, mother. He searches for “yogurt bottles, empty cosmetics jars, broken plastic dippers and basins, cans, glass bottles.”

The grandfather of modern Korean fiction has left a lot of himself in this novel, with old, favourite literary devices running into the pages, and coupling the lost characters. Hwang loves a ghost story, and here they are – through shamanistic dreams – linking the development and change of a fast moving Korea to something more aged, more fragile, more wholesome.

It’s a theme that connects to the garbage itself, dragged and discarded from the new world next-door – “Each item carried with it an air of sadness or regret”.

Even those few years, that unique and dangerous time in Korean life, when Hwang was in his pomp – both as a writer and presumably a man – trickles gently before the reader, with subtle references: when Bugeye’s father is arrested and sentenced to a lengthy spell in prison, it’s because “the new general had seized power and declared that he would clean up society”. And instead of an unpleasant cellblock, he marks-off the passing years in an unpleasant “re-education camp”.

Through the maggots, crushed soda cans, the smell and the grime, this is a community of the type that Hwang admires (he was jailed in the 1960s for supporting the labour union movement, and then later sentenced to seven years in prison for travelling to North Korea in 1989). This is ugly and dark, but the garbage also shines wonderful, “iridescent” colours of “black and white and red and blue and yellow…”

There is also a lot of the translator, Sora Kim-Russell, in this novel, with whimsical and oddly British turns of phrase littering the language: “faraway land”, “wasn’t too shabby”. With the only possible exception of Deborah Smith, Kim-Russell is at the apex of her game (Korean-to-English literary translation). Everything flows so well that even small glitches in the elegance of the prose – like using “so big” and “so huge” as pivots in the same sentence – don’t catch the reader like they otherwise might:

“The cap was so big that it slid down until the rim touched his nose, and the combat boots were so huge that he had plenty of space left”

For the people that live in this public squalor, and make it a home, it is Flower Island! And strangely there is money to be made, “three times as much” as Bugeye’s mother previously could working at a market back inside the city limits.

With all the fights and bruises, the late-night drinking and gambling, the long – grinding – days of unfulfilling work, everyone on Flower Island grows up fast and happy. Parents are fluid, people break-up regularly, swap lovers, with new mothers and fathers moving into the vacated bedspace of the small plastic-walled huts; to leave again a month or so later.

There is an adventurous lawlessness to it all – life has to be light and unattached, or it quickly becomes intolerable and vicious. The only real constraining rule on Flower Island is also the most obvious one: “laugh it off” or leave.

With no space or time for tantrums, children are treated as adults. The care and concern is real, but it can never be too involved or smothering – if sons and daughters don’t come home for dinner, or don’t come home at all, it is casually assumed that they are eating and sleeping elsewhere, comfortable enough, and safe.

Until it’s not, in sudden, unexpected, and wonderfully paced shifts of the narrative. When a late rampage of fire grips the slums, with trash and homes burning as one, everything hits an appropriate panic – watching the residents struggle towards the island’s outer limits, away from their lives and their income. The reader fizzes in the heart of this fear and heat, across page-after-page, and then the fire dies and everyone takes a few calming breaths. Only for Hwang to – almost as an afterthought – drop in a single, final, resonating sentence: “Baldspot’s body was discovered two days later”.

Like the blue lights that keep appearing, pulling the characters between shamanistic worlds, past and present and tenderly lost, there is a lesson here – something that every police detective and stalker already knows to an art.

When the Chuseok holiday comes around in early autumn, the food waste begins to multiply and change – “once-frozen rice”, “shucked oysters”, “whole fish”, “heads of cabbage”. Then as the weather gets colder it’s “hello coal”, and so on… It is amazing how much you can learn from someone by going through their trash!

Outcast and hated, Flower Island unavoidably has the pulse of the city next door – watching in the darkness and distance, knowing, devoted, admiring, and living off its appetite. It is only when they reach-out for some affection, step over the gate, befriend the guard dog, and begin testing the locks, that Familiar Things also become dangerous and “unloved”.

“The appearance of a great hero” – Review of Minsoo Kang’s ‘The Story of Hong Gildong’

Everyone already knows this story, in their own way! No matter where it happens, there is a home for it — a comfortable, cosy place, just under the surface of national identity and individual courage. It’s tight within the bones of people — and yet also a story that no one has ever read!

A talented child leaves behind a life of somewhat-luxury for a rugged, semi-nomadic home, alone, in the wilderness. He soon joins, and then leads a gang of outlaws, who begin fighting injustice, and righting the wrongs of society. He is smarter than his enemies, of unwavering morality, always a champion of the people; he steals from the rich and gives to the poor.

Of course, this is Robin Hood! But in Australia it’s Ned Kelly, in Japan it’s Nezumi Kozo, in Scotland it’s Rob Roy MacGregor, in Mexico its La Carambada… In Korea, it’s something a little more — it’s The Story of Hong Gildong, “arguably the single most important work of classic (i.e., premodern) prose fiction”, and a name borne so deep into history and culture that it is still used as a generic place-holder on government forms, like John Doe is in other countries.

From this light home, Hong Gildong is also a megalomaniac, a self-righteous egoist, a frivolous and joyriding criminal, as well as a messianic faith-healer. And none of this is understated or possible to miss, every page hits the reader — hard — with an assault on even the most calloused of moral sentiments. Hong Gildong is a shockingly unpleasant literary figure — and yet, somehow, his story and name have stood up to the ravages of time.

This must be expected. A look back in time at the real-life Robin Hood, would almost certainly be an immediate cure to the romance he is held in today — a lunatic stalking the outer forests of Nottingham, preying greedily on common-folk and aristocracy alike, lining his pockets through violence and terror. It wouldn’t be pleasant viewing, there wouldn’t be any merry men.

So we need more than translation here, we need the story torn open, exposed, with silence and detail bleeding thick into the narrative — welcome, Minsoo Kang.

Subtleties of language aside, there is a lot of heavy lifting involved in this new Penguin Classic. Layer-upon-layer of pseudo-history needs to be offset, the work of other writers and academics needs to be reference-checked and often discarded, and a lot of people are going to get their feelings hurt. Kang looks into Hong Gildong like the trained historian that he is, without intention or deference or concern for the centrality that this story holds in Korean folklore and literature.

So it is also a lens onto the Joseon Dynasty, the difficulties of attribution, the wide-open-spaces where documents are lost or events never recorded, the challenges of weeding out vested interests, and a poignant lesson on how cultural memes work — once alive, replicating faithfully across generations, unchecked and unquestioned.

Nagging the reader with Homer-esque prose — ‘this happened…, this happened…, then this happened…, this was thought…, this was then thought…, this was also thought… — in many ways this is a Korean Iliad. And inside the story itself, there is a breathless, hungry intent to build the character of Hong Gildong into a man destined to be more.

Just like those descriptions of the Trojan Wars — which again shockingly few people have actually read — every opportunity to pause, embellish, lie, and remind the reader of the superman before them, is taken. Rather than a lone Greek soldier — with nothing but a sword in hand — deep in lust for revenge, defeating thousands of enemies unaided, with Hong Gildong it is slightly more elusive.

Either way, there is nothing aspirational here, there can’t be! And this seems, at first, an odd literary device: by destiny of the stars, these people are not like you and me. Don’t bother with imitation! None of what you are reading can be repeated, it has to be born.

There are no imperfections in the character of Hong Gildong, no failures or mistakes. He is unstoppable. Or rather he is only ever held back by the unfair limitations of Joseon Korea — one limitation in particular: the status of illegitimate children like himself. With his pathway to greatness and success taken from him, Hong Gildong begins to look in other directions.

And it’s likely this soppy emotion that mostly appeals to Koreans today — and explains why this story is bound so tight from history to modern nationalism. With each new foreign invasion, Koreans have seen themselves held-back from their ‘rightful destiny’; everything swirling into a deep bitterness about lost potential. (Unsurprisingly then, it is during the period of Japanese colonialization that this old tale is reborn, cleaned, polished, and made ‘Korean’).

Whereas the figure of Robin Hood was at war against a parochial tyranny and individual greed, Hong Gildong raises his sword against the Joseon Dynasty as a whole. The grumble that starts all this violence, and alights the whole peninsula in warfare? Hong Gildong — as an illegitimate child — was denied the chance to refer to his “father as Father”. It makes the reader shudder to think what he might have done with some real suffering in his life, or god forbid, if he had more than one grievance to complain about.

It is all very filial and ridiculous. When Hong’s mother was made a concubine by his wealthy, powerful father — having no choice in the matter — we are told “From that day on she never ventured outside the house and showed no interest in other men.” What a shock, the prisoner couldn’t leave her cell!

The Confucianism of the period runs deep here, with Hong Gildong, the boy “born with the appearance of a great hero”, and destined to sniff-out injustice in the world, fawning over his father’s grace in between beatings for daring to acknowledge him as the parent he is — “You have shown me nothing but deep and constant love”, only to be told “If you ever speak of this matter again you’ll be severely punished.”

Hong Gildong’s nose for unfairness starts in his own household, but never actually applies to it; only to the Joseon proto-state. Echoing the hubris of youth today, people who can’t hold onto jobs nor fix their own lives, but still join protest marches and insist loudly that they can change the world instead.

So with a small turn of well-studied witchcraft — a theme that runs throughout, with the reader reminded of “the marvellous power’s Gildong possessed” — Hong Gildong leaves the home that his mother cannot, and becomes an outlaw.

And as an outlaw his thin morality breaks down immediately, as he more often than not cannot “allay his wrath”, and makes a habit of executing people “out of vengeance”.

Robin Hood stumbles upon his gang by accident, and then sticks around, in as much as anything to teach them a new, gentler, code of ethics for their criminality. There is no soft belly to Hong Gildong as he goes out immediately in search of “the lair of the bandits of Taesokbaek Mountain”. And rather than convincing his new friends of his qualities, they see it in his “appearance of a heroic personage”.

Welcomed into the gang, and then promoted to leader, it is worth remembering here that, though “filled with fury”, this is still just a ten year old boy; if you can believe it!

“Magical skills” in hand, Hong Gildong and the Taesokbaek Mountain bandits start terrorising the “eight provinces of Joseon”. It is all very violent, very self-congratulatory, and with the strange — yet unmissable — tone of a social climber, someone consciously building their resume for the next step in their career and an improved circle of friends.

As the story moves forward, morality is left behind. There is less-and-less of the Robin Hood archetype that Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘Noble Robber’, and more of a nasty, hardened criminal, ruthlessly fighting his way to the top. When the King has had enough of this, and agrees to negotiate an end to the insurrection, Hong Gildong asks only for one thing (after which he will leave the kingdom forever): “the position of minister of war”.

And just like that, with only a personal trophy to show for it, he walks away — so much for fighting the injustices of society!

The story casually shifts into its third phase, with Hong Gildong, his bandits, and their families boarding ships, and leaving Joseon for an island called Jae, then another called Yul. And here, finally beyond the reach of those old Confucian prejudices, any hope for an honourable and redeeming twist collapses entirely; along with the narrative itself.

The first two royal decisions of King Hong Gildong? First, decree that this new paradise is built in a mirror-image of Joseon, replicating its political order, aristocracy, and even system of titles and grants that left Hong Gildong isolated and girdled as an illegitimate child. The second? Making two women, named Jeong and Jo, his “concubines” because he simply, “could not resist them”…

Minsoo Kang writes with appropriate derision: “It is as if Hong Gildong the king has completely forgotten his earlier frustrations as a secondary son.” Such an easy exit doesn’t apply here. It’s unmistakable from language what is happening, as our all-conquering hero laments into his old age about those humiliations of his youth, rehashing dead grievances and talking endlessly about being denied by his father and brother.

Hong Gildong cares deeply about injustice — if, and only if, he is on the wrong side of it.

And here it ends, where all good folklore should: with old age, a comfortable retirement, and whimsical musings over the past. But with all that has been, and like a reflexive victim of trauma, when the reader is told that, finally, “The land was at peace with no sign of trouble anywhere”, it is hard not to have the thought, ‘of course it was, because for the first time in recent memory there wasn’t an adolescent terrorist running through the provinces, robbing, killing and pillaging all he could find’.

Then, with his victims still stitching their wounds, and his new kingdom secured under his rule — the world either burning or servile — Hong Gildong turns unemotionally to the camera, and with the unlearning tone of a husband just done beating his wife, says “I tell you that all of this could have been prevented if only I were allowed to address my father as Father and my older brother as Brother.”

“Stubbornly swollen” - Review of Frances Cha’s ‘If I Had Your Face’

I always noticed them… I just didn’t care very much.

For part of my working week I am in an office, and have to make regular visits from my desk to the printing room. Behind the main printer someone has installed a large pane of glass; I am not sure what its purpose is, and have never bothered to ask, but it’s not a mirror...

Every time I walk into the room, one, two, or more, of the younger women in the organisation will be crowding for their reflections. Touching up strands of hair, layers of make-up, and practicing different expressions, from different angles. I squeeze past them, say hello (they all seem to be called things like Joy or Ruby or Sunny) and leave them to it – as if they are playing a sport that I don’t know the rules to, and am not very interested in learning.

Of course I still judge them! Tragic, hopeless, and just a little intimidating, it is one of the few wonderfully acceptable prejudices to still hold. They steal eyes, and dominate space, polished and perfect; humming with vigour, their hard work has its payoffs, if only small.

Then I would leave the printing room, and my mind would move elsewhere, my self-consciousness would fade and I would forget about my face; they wouldn’t! Back in their own offices, in meetings, or talking with clients, they would slowly fizz with a growing anxiety, constantly fingering hair and clothes, and stealing glances into anything that offered a reflection.

I never saw any of them, in their fraught, and excruciatingly long, morning transitions – “fall[ing] apart yet again this week in front of our bathroom mirror, agitated and despairing”.

Unfortunately Frances Cha’s novel, If I Had Your Face, lends itself to cliché. It didn’t need much more than the title (this is Cha’s first literary effort) to make it an instant ‘best seller’; if that term still means anything. Without glancing at a single page, most readers will instantly feel that they understand the whole book. It’s personal to everyone, in some way!

The Korean fascination with feminine beauty, plastic surgery, dumb glamour and K-pop, isn’t really that ‘Korean’ at all. But it is the current high-water mark of this degrading impossibility. So pay no attention to the pre-order numbers, or the second, third, fourth editions already published only a month after its first release. Don’t believe the hype and excitement, this is not the book that you think it is… it’s much better!

And you can see clearly where the change happens – drawn firmly after the second chapter – where Cha puts aside the thick, wieldy, paintbrush for a thinner, much more delicate, option. The concept steps back from the page, and the author takes over. It is subtle, and it makes every bit of difference.

All the heavy, expected, themes are there from the first two chapters. Hair shops, nail rooms, motherhood, SKY (Korean Ivy League) universities, K-pop and celebrity culture, marriage and men, money, the lack of money, the best plastic surgery hospital in Seoul (the ‘Cinderella Clinic’), and the constant longing for a different shape, a different beauty, and all the possibilities it would bring – “I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.”

Then, from a novel about “electrically beautiful girls” and “asshole” men, Cha leaves everything behind and writes a pleasingly complex look at morality, universal injustice, and personal agency.

If I Had Your Face bleeds the stories of four women – Kyuri, Ara, Miho and Wonna – all connected through a fifth voice that we never hear directly from, Sujin, who is digging into debt and pain for new eyes and a new jawline; a new life. She wants what Kyuri has!

‘Room salons’ are a Korean bridge between child-like entertainment, stripping, and prostitution. An odd, parochial phenomenon where groups of men book shared rooms equipped with karaoke machines. They also book young women to sit on their laps, flirt with them, and pour drinks. This is the legal side. Soon the men develop relationships with their hosts, and for a new price, everyone is looking the other way as “round 2” starts and the salon becomes a brothel.

“10 percent” salons only hire the “prettiest 10 percent of girls in the industry”, and for someone who hugs their vices tight as their only virtue, it’s either K-pop and the quintessential celebrity lifestyle, or this. These are the swirling, gaseous years of ambition, where junkies brag unashamedly about the size of their addiction, convinced all along that those drugs are also their ticket to stardom and success.

But before anyone gets in the 10 percent, they need surgery, of some kind; there is always something to be fixed or improved upon. Sujin bides her time – post-reconstruction – polishing nails at a different kind of salon, face covered by a mask, eyes down on the job at hand. Waiting impatiently for her “stubbornly swollen” face to find its new bone structure, and hoping that just enough of the sensation returns so that she doesn’t need a mirror “to check if food or drink were dribbling down my chin.”

Either way, “you get used to it”! You battle on with your confusion, and your hopelessness!

Inappropriately, it is Ara’s voice that we hear first, small, delicate, of violently strong will, and mute – even her “laugh is soundless”. In a merry-go-round of futility and desperation, Ara is easily the most sympathy-inducing of the characters. Her mistakes are easier to understand, her fascination with K-pop tickles upon a childlike quality, and her everyday plight – as she struggles to express herself on a notepad – sets off explosions within the reader’s protective instincts

Her face then changes, and brutality verging on cruelty becomes the problem-solver that her voice cannot be, cold, sudden, and familiar. She doesn’t need our help after all. None of the characters do: the soft artist in Miho turns suddenly to revenge, the heavily pregnant Wonna chews-up her husband like the Korean mothers-in-law that she hates so much, and Kyuri shifts from social climber to love struck schoolgirl, and then on to careful diplomat. (The minor characters all get this same treatment, in their own way.)

Through the crisp and careful prose, the well-constructed empty spaces, and delicate pacing, there is always going to be the tendency to over simplify If I Had Your Face. But if it must be pinched-small, then it’s a war novel – full of carnage, absurdity, and constant struggle. Each day fighting and failing, each day dirtied and beaten, no-one leaving the trenches un-scarred or sane.

It is also a refreshingly honest look at victimhood... as a celestial pre-requisite for life. The weak are stronger than we give them credit for, and the social elites are fragile in what should be obvious ways, suffering through their days like the rest of us. There are no lazy pats on the back here or empty categories, just pain, hurt, and the clear truth that to call oneself a ‘victim’ is an unbearable act of indulgence and egoism – “Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else”.

We are all, to some degree, in abusive relationships with our own appearance and the world beyond – but with every punch, bruise, insult, degradation, and injustice, there is also, mostly, happiness! A battle-torn camaraderie, a joy in the blood and the fight. 

This is what I missed about those women, consumed by the mirror in our office. The endless maintenance and dollification is still a losing battle, as we all breakdown slowly toward “imminent expiration date[s].” But there is still laughter and strength; smiles and an uncommon lightness that is hard not to admire.

Just like Frances Cha’s female characters, I also live in a terrible apartment complex in a wonderful neighbourhood. On the same morning that I finished reading If I Had Your Face, I walked into the elevator to leave for work and was chased down by a young lady, racing to catch the closing doors. She jumped into the small space, excited, loud, and in deep conversation with herself.

She then saw her reflection in the glass panel on the back wall, leaned closer to examine her face, and let out a deep breathless moan. The ride down to the ground floor became a panicked lesson in the retouching of make-up, to a rising soundtrack of guttural, disappointed sighs.

When the doors finally opened – announced by a loud bell – she instantly peeled away her sadness, perked upright, smiled at me with an exaggerated wave goodbye, and leaped out of the elevator with the same bounce and glee that she entered with. No hesitation or backward steps – and formidably alive – the world didn’t know what was about to hit it!

I turned, catching a quick peep in the glass, and noticed that I had been unconsciously twisting my fringe through my fingers – something that I am sure I do a lot, without ever realising it. I walk out of the terrible apartment and into the wonderful neighbourhood, a little slower, a little heavier, a little more cautious and weak.

“A fallen meteorite” – Review of Jeong You-Jeong’s ‘The Good Son’

“The smell of blood woke me.” And so Jeong You-jeong starts in the worse possible way, with trodden, nerve-dulling, cliché. It’s enough to stop even the faintest literary ear from reading further, and discard The Good Son after only one sentence. Without any claim to such an ear myself, I kicked on.

And it doesn’t improve much, at least not right away. Clumsy mistakes are one thing, but The Good Son consistently talks down to the reader. Prose is thrown, and then smeared, uncaringly on the pages. The dizzying haste of the writing process remains uncleaned, unedited, and exposed without shame to the audience, as if this, somehow, was the intention all along… and maybe it was!

Getting old, tired, and beyond the point of caring about status and judgement, the great novelist Kingsley Amis once told his son Martin (an established author in his own right) that he was finished with the highbrow side of literature. From there-out everything he touched was only going to be light and entertaining, it was only going to be thrillers and murder mysteries – “I am never going to read a novel again unless it begins with a shot rang out.”

This was also a kind, roundabout way, of telling his son that he wouldn’t be reading anymore of his books. Martin Amis’s prose was too wordy, too deliberately intellectual, and there was too much delight in the play of language; to the detriment of the story. Working around this, Martin would jump into the genre himself, writing his own murder mystery, London Fields, and even dedicating it to his father. Kingsley still wasn’t interested, and never opened a page.

It’s worth remembering who this is coming from: Kingsley Amis lived and died at the apex of literary sensibility. He wasn’t falling apart with age, he was just re-confessing to an old truth – that reading should be fun. But it doesn’t always need to be a blunt-force commitment in either direction. While reading in this way, Amis’s last ever book, The King's English – published posthumously – was a writing guide on the uses and abuses of the English language.

So Kingsley Amis might not have had a problem with Jeong You-jeong’s opening sentence, he might even have cheered in excitement, but as the pages of The Good Son trundled forward he too would have discarded the book as it began to fall short of his only remaining criteria for reading: entertainment.

Grand literary entrances like ‘a shot rang out in the night’ or “The smell of blood woke me” are skyhooks for the heavy lifting to come. An acknowledgement that the reader is going to have to endure something a little tedious, a very slow-burn before anything really catches light. All with the hope that enough is promised from that first sentence – enough to keep people there, smiling, and trudging forward, searching desperately for the flames.

But what then happens if the spark never catches? Or worse, when the author stares back at you without love or interest, and throws away her box of matches without ever bothering to drag a lazy piece of red sulphur across the striking paper; smug and convinced in her own light, from her odd angle on things, that, in fact, the room is already burning with incandescent colour.

The Good Son is an odd mess of dreams, memories, hallucinations, side-effects of medication, memory-loss, flashbacks, and conversations with ghosts. In doing this, the book also jumps between times, tenses and perspectives without natural or obvious breaks; language bleeds into itself almost as a stream of consciousness, leaving the reader to catch their own steps, backtrack, and search for where, and why, the change happened – doing the author’s job for her.

And when the pace of things is eventually broken – marking out four large chapters – it still serves no purpose as each chapter simply flows from the same place and moment where the previous one left off (the epilogue being the only exception to this). The writing rolls forward breathlessly, without pause, patience or structure.

Our young protagonist, Yu-jin, wakes up smelling blood, then he sees it also. The room, the house, his bed, his clothes, all red from whatever happened last night – and downstairs his mother is also covered, cold and murdered. Jeong You-jeong’s disconnected mind starts here, with an empty memory, an obvious crime, and the realisation that “clues to who had killed mother were all over the place”.

Immediately that disconnect, and the limitations of the author are there to be seen, and the few literary devices she has in her toolbox repeat so often that they suffocate the novel, etched into every turn and twist like a heavy, creeping, oily fog. Time stamps bounce back and forth across every paragraph and sentence – these are from a single representative page: “1:30am”, “1:31am”, “1:34am”, “12:10am”, “12:15”, “12:30am”, “12:30am”, “12:30am”, “1:34am”.

And instead of carefully sculpting the growth of intrigue and mystery, Jeong takes a sluggish shortcut and bombards her reader with a series of internal questions from the confused Yu-jin – these are from a single paragraph, if you can believe it: “she would have…”, “she would…”, “would she…”, “would she…”, “would she…”, “did she…”, “maybe she…”, “did she…”, “why didn’t she…”, “why didn’t you…”, “why did you…”, “why did Mother…”, “why would you…”.

At every turn Jeong fails that old clichéd rule of writing: ‘show, don’t tell’. Trust your readers’ intelligence. If the details and connections are there, then they will be found. An overlay of language re-announcing every small detail – “Things that had seemed unrelated to one another and the clues I’d shrugged off or ignored were beginning to come together” – is redundant, unless the narrative is also. It’s here where most of the troubles seem to hit: it never feels like what the author had in her mind is what we are getting on paper.

It’s a disease that burrows deep into the prose’s bone marrow. At this point the problem might be in translation – or more accurately with the translator – but regardless, it stings the tastebuds; on every page, at every turn, there is new disappointment, something which claws you away from the story, and into the laziness of the writing process. I challenge anyone not to cringe when, without laying any context, Yu-jin is saying things like:

“I would have to focus and trust my cheetah legs.”

When the words ‘seizure’ and ‘severity’ are allowed to sit next to each other in this sentence, crashing the sounds together.

 “I wasn’t anxious about the seizure severity”

Or take this as a complete, intact, and horribly conceived passage:

“Whose feet were these? A doll’s? A ghost’s? Looking down from above didn’t provide any answers. I had to figure out what was going on. I gritted my teeth and continued ahead.”

Where to start with this? First, why would anyone see human feet and think it is a doll or a ghost? “Looking down”, as opposed to what? The feet, as with the body, are of course on the ground. “Whose feet were these”, “I had to figure out what was going on”? Well take a step forward, turn your head, and mystery solved! Ordinary people don’t pause to think in moments like these, especially when the only feet they could possibly be are your mother’s (she’s the only other person in the house). And “Continued ahead”? It’s hard to conceive of a more non-descript choice of language (except, perhaps, when later in the novel, heavy rain is being called “adverse conditions”). No care or thought – in any way – has been taken for the possibilities of expression and evocation.

It’s impossible to avoid the thought that The Good Son looks like this, and reads in this way, because Jeong You-jeong never really believes - at any point - that her audience is along for the ride. The whole novel is thick with a rough, grainy slime. Nothing about it is compelling, thought provoking or polished.

But then, just like that, around halfway into the book – when most readers would have already given up – something happens. The prose and style remain frozen and manufactured, but the pigments around it all change, everything takes a new light; a little more interesting, a lot more psychopathic.

From here, in retrospect, some of those previous literary calamities aren’t quite so bad. The author’s internal voice isn’t as broken as it first seemed. And the constant lack of realistic emotion and human reaction begins to make more sense. It all just takes too long, and sadly, I imagine, most people will never get this far into the book. Too much endurance is needed for far too little of a payoff.

In another late moment of his life, Kingsley Amis was personally sent a copy of Julian Barnes’s then-newly released book, Flaubert’s Parrot. Hanging desperately for his feedback, Barnes eventually contacted Amis and asked what he thought. Amis casually replied that he hadn’t managed to read past the third chapter: “[I] might have considered plodding on a bit further if only one of the two chaps there had pulled out a gun and shot the other chap”.

Shin Kyung-sook doesn’t see it this way! Attached proudly to the back cover of The Good Son, is her endorsement: “This book will pull you in; as you devour it, you may find yourself”. I have often suspected that Korean authors feel a strange need to be kind to their contemporaries, to help usher in new voices, or to be nice to old colleagues. A community where everyone hugs close, helps each other with positive reviews, where nobody criticises mistakes, and where a protective shield is erected between writers and their words.

But even then, for Korea’s most prominent writer – someone with a sharpened understanding of trade subtleties – to say such a thing, about this book, stretches the mind in impossible ways. It’s enough to make you wake up smelling blood.

“I don’t have the energy to die” – Review of Gong Ji-young’s ‘Our Happy Time’

“With the heart of a trapper awaiting a snared animal” Gong Ji-young watches her reader approaching, walking delicately onto the unassuming ground of her novel. Then, snap! The wire pulls tight as the supporting branch straightens into the air. Bouncing softly to rest above the grass, the carefully tied noose now dangles exposed – the cold, mechanical gadget is a success, and it’s clearly well-designed, but it’s also empty, set off too early by an impatient hunter; nothing inside.

Our Happy Time holds an odd place in the Korean literary scene, as does its author. New readers to the genre will first stumble into Han Kang, Shin Kyung-sook, Hwang Sok-yong, and Kim Young-ha, then work their way through The Vegetarian, Please Look After Mother, The Guest, and I Have The Right To Destroy Myself. It’s a happy, fated initiation.

Then our reader – surfing a crescendo of prose and story-telling – will be prodded toward Gong Ji-young and Our Happy Time. And straightaway something feels off! The style is simple but impressive, the development of the characters hits in just the way it needs to, but it’s all a little childish at the same time. From the opening sequences, the author’s enthusiasm for her own story begins to run out-of-control, and the small details on which the narrative hinges are suffocated of the oxygen they deserve.

There is an incomplete, scattered honesty in this type of thing. George Orwell explained how a writer’s mind can be corrupted by their own integrity in this way: sitting down to write Homage to Catalonia, he found himself compulsively pasting long, meandering “newspaper quotations” in violation of his better “literary instincts”. When a critic pushed him on this decision, “Why did you put in all that stuff?” Orwell happily admitted that it – in part – “ruin[ed] the book”, but that also he “could not have done otherwise”. He had a purpose for writing Homage, a reason for why he first put pen to paper, and remaining faithful to that reason took precedence over form, flow and style.

With her own purpose for writing Our Happy Time obvious from the earliest of steps, Gong Ji-young is also restless and in a hurry to get there. And after a very brief throat clearing, Gong can’t bear her own suspense any longer – “So, what do you want to do? Stay in here for a month and go through therapy again? Or help me with something?” Not the most well-conceived premise, but nothing here is. Our Happy Time is light, ditzy, and structurally weak… yet it didn’t need to be, and this certainly wasn’t the intention.

Our loosely hooked protagonist, Yujeong, is young, intelligent, wealthy, and once mildly famous. She is also recovering from her third unsuccessful suicide attempt, and it’s her hard-edged aunt, a nun, that wants her help spreading the gospel at the local prison – “Since you agreed to help me out for a month, you have to promise you won’t kill yourself before then…Can you do that for me?” Thanks for the kindness, auntie!

From here out, the religiosity rumbles along like a sinister background noise; a Pavlovian type of indoctrination. So much effort is made to talk up the doubts and holes within peoples’ faith, the unassuming anti-proselytising approach of Aunt Monica, and the happy absence of religion in the lives of otherwise moral people, that it feels aggressive nonetheless – like a shy Mormon at your front door on a Sunday afternoon, he doesn’t pester you, or push you with questions and brochures. In fact he doesn’t even talk or ring the bell. He just stands there silently on your doorstep waiting for you to notice him out of the corner of your eye.

This is not a casual literary device, this is why Gong wrote the book. Religion aside, Our Happy Time is a deep dive into uncomfortable questions of morality, luck, and truth. It seems every well-known Korean author has a taste for Friedrich Nietzsche, and he gets his obligatory reference point here, but where so much of Korean literature tries-and-fails to be philosophically stout, Gong achieves this… and it feels natural, effortless even.

It’s just that it dances too often on a bed of inconsistent prose and a draft-like inner voice. Take for example how successful a passage like this can be:

“He was a being who transcended death, glimmering with some feral quality possessed by those who swear themselves in their youth to a lonely death in the wild.”

As opposed to these disturbingly lazy efforts:

“Everyone was going somewhere. No matter the destination, they all had to get somewhere. But did any of them really know where they were going?”

“As for me, I was beginning to think that I wanted to face him for a different reason. Was that because I was sensing that the person I really wanted to face was myself?”

The contrasts continue between thoughtful statements like this:

“You had to hurt in order to be enlightened.”

And unbearable platitudes:

“There was more than met the eye”

And just in case you think these quotes might be unfairly cherry-picked, take these two consecutive sentences – from meaningful to banal in an instant:

“Sometimes words can be so concrete and so real, and therefore so cruel. Maybe that’s what they meant when they said the pen is mightier than the sword.”

Gong’s central characters moan endlessly about hating two things in particular: cliché and hypocrisy. Throughout Our Happy Time they repeat the sentiment to nausea, cliché is mentioned on fourteen different occasions, hypocrisy seventeen. Through this echo, and the representative prose above, an obvious truth begins to build in the reader’s mind – these characters would likely also hate their author.

If you can battle through this awkwardness, there is still something impressive to be found – a horrible, nasty, metaphysical swamp; a place that pulls open scar tissue and exposes old nerve-endings, fizzing once more in the damp air. It’s all uncomfortably real, and morality regains its true dimensions here. There are only hard choices, mess, dirt, and self-disgust.

Here victimhood is ambiguous (often irrelevant), kindness is a different shade of selfishness, volunteers are hoping for personal reward, forgiveness is a base sentimentality, everyone is irrevocably broken, no one is strong enough to resist shame and judgement, some peoples’ lives are genuinely not worth living, and so the only solution is either murder or suicide; even then, in that moment, twisted, unsure and botched – “Why do they always talk about killing the rich when all of their victims are poor?”

It’s in this nervous energy and sinking life that Gong Ji-young rediscovers the lost threads of her novel. The conversations and building relationship between our central character and a death row inmate, Yunsu, are all, brazenly, clichéd. But Our Happy Time walks the line between good and evil incredibly well, one eye on brightness, light and possibility, the other one being gored violently from its socket by the realities of who we are, and the darkness inside us. And even when you surrender, and resign yourself to ending it all, you still manage to fail; pinned under this same weight, this same weakness – “I don’t have the energy to die… I don’t have the will or the courage to die.”

“I used to be pretty famous” – Review of Kim Young-ha’s ‘Diary of a Murderer’

Perhaps, after all these years, we should start taking Kim Young-ha at his word – he has “nothing to do with literature”. And yet, somehow, he is still far-and-away Korea’s most interesting writer.

Kim’s fame came early and thick, taking his reader into a difficult and strangely personal world – the life’s work of a suicide consultant on the streets of Seoul, with I Have The Right To Destroy Myself. In length and development it had the feel of a side-project, a warm-up for something real. It was as if Kim wasn’t yet sure of his ability to make it as a novelist, and was first testing the market with a short, introspective, draft-like piece of writing; something that didn’t require too much time and commitment, and so wouldn’t hurt too much if it failed to find an audience, or even a publisher.

I Have The Right To Destroy Myself did something long overdue and remarkable. The Korean literary scene at the time was dominated by a few large names, all writing with a single theme and purpose. Through delicate, Mandarin prose, they wrote Mandarin novels about ancestral wounds and sacrifice, of suffering and its romance, and the impure – un-Korean – effects of social change.

From the beginning Kim was far too animalised and muddied to play this game, instead he pushed into the uncomfortable pulse of modern Korean life – rolling unashamed in its shallow, nihilistic masochism; remembering throughout just how funny all this pain and suffering can sometimes be. “I only want to draw out morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious. This lust, once freed, starts growing. The caller’s imagination runs free, and she soon discovers her potential”.

The leap from Kim’s first book to his latest, Diary of a Murderer, isn’t one at all. Despite the years of writing and tradecraft under his belt, there has been a complete flat line of literary growth and style. Kim is still dark, still unbearably human through the slight details of his work, and all the weaknesses of his writing are still exposed, raw and lumbering. And yet there is still a substantial leap here, and something to cheer, because what he gave us in those middle years – through books like Black Flower, Your Republic Is Calling You and I Hear Your Voice – had the smell of disease.

We are dealing here with a style of writing designed for blunder and emptiness; it overreaches – not as a calculated literary device – but with a greedy, salivating hunger. Like a smug high school student trying to impress his teachers, no plot twist is too crude, no drip-feed of detail too obvious, and narrative selection is absolutely everything.

A suicide consultant (I Have The Right To Destroy Myself), a Korean slave labourer in Cuba (Black Flower), a North Korean spy in Seoul (Your Republic Is Calling You), a motorcycle outlaw (I Hear Your Voice), and now, with Diary of a Murderer, an elderly serial killer with encroaching dementia. Someone who remembers who he is, and how much fun he has had strangling his victims – “those were good times” – but is now waking up confused, covered in mud, and wondering who he might have killed last night, and where he might have buried them; or reading of new murder cases in the local newspaper – “they found another female body… on a country road” – and asking himself ‘is that one of mine?’

Apparently this is how the “Alzheimer’s-diseased brain” works, old memories are the last to fade, so – at least in the early stages – it’s really “future memories” that become a problem. The patient is frozen in time, forgetting that there is food on the stove, why they’re in their car and where they’re going, or who the dog that keeps digging up human bones from your garden belongs to. A careful, methodical, career serial killer becomes clumsy and amateur.

It’s a wonderful premise, and the humour writes itself:

“One bad thing about living so many years as a murderer: you have no close friends to talk to”

Or

[Asked by his adopted daughter where her birth mother might be today] “Where do you think she is now?”

“Who knows? She might even be somewhere very nearby.”

In our yard for instance.

But, as with Black Flower and I Hear Your Voice, too much of the story feels hacked together and borrowed from existing art and history. The echo from the 1980’s Hwaseong serial killings in Gyeonggi Province is impossible to miss, but Kim Young-ha still can’t help himself, fumbling-in an unnecessarily explicit reference, along with a mention of its movie adaption Memories of Murder (Directed by Bong Joon-ho).

What isn’t mentioned but deserves to be, is Christopher Nolan’s Memento from which Kim seems to borrow an extraordinary amount of memory-related detail. Still none of this is as crude or blunt as the opening line, carved unmistakably from Albert Camus’s famous first sentence in The Stranger. Camus was trying to quickly set an emotional coldness to his leading character, a casual indifference to things that shouldn’t be possible. Kim is clearly impressed by this effort:

Camus: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”

Kim: “It’s been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six?”

The uncomfortable literary decision-making doesn’t stop here. There are repeated analogies to gods, religion and zombies; our serial killer is somehow both completely amoral and yet morally introspective: “my punishment is Alzheimer’s”; an amateur philosophy runs over the text like out-of-control backup vocals – “Montaigne’s Essays”, “Greek classics”, “Homer”, “Odyssey”, “Odysseus”, “Sophocles”, “Oedipus Rex”, “Oedipus”, “Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, “Nietzsche”, “Nietzsche”, “Nietzsche” – only for the reader to be later informed that “I don’t know philosophy”; and the use of “hunting” as a metaphor for murder repeats so often that it becomes impossible not to ask if the author – just like with his protagonist – has forgotten what he has only just said a few pages earlier. 

For the author Clive James, successful writing was a process of “turn[ing] a phrase until it catches the light.” Labouring over the elegance of a sentence is not something that Kim Young-ha has likely ever done. At the end of I Hear Your Voice, when the story takes a semi-autobiographical turn, Kim speaks of the difficulties he was having finishing the novel. His blunt-force solution? “I began writing to a word count every day”. When Diary of a Murderer repeats the same turn into memoir, we hear it again: “We’re [novelists] built differently from Poets or critics. We’re the marines of literature, its manual laborers and butcher shop owners”. Perhaps for Kim, but it’s hard to imagine Han Kang, Shin Kyung-sook, or Hwang Sok-yong thinking this way about their work.

In love with storytelling but not language, Kim is just never going to be a literary sniper, someone who steps back from the action, steadies his thoughts, delicately selects a target, squeezes the trigger, and bets his success on a kill-shot. No! He is a lunatic, a mass shooter with too many guns and too much ammunition, firing indiscriminately into a crowded school yard. Sure, he misses the target a lot, but he was hoping only for a massacre, and that it definitely is.

His novels do this to you. They reach up from a pool of unconscious emotion and strangle the reader, ever tighter with each passing page. The imperfections fade under this grip, and you become absorbed, even fascinated, by the violence playing out on your own body. As the bruising settles into your skin, the sharp pain hums-down into a satisfying ache, you catch sight of yourself in a broken mirror and notice that you are smiling. It then dawns on you, that maybe, just maybe, you quite enjoy a little light choking from time-to-time. A little harder next time, please!

Kim’s mistakes here are not the result of laziness (not always anyway), but of bravery and impatience. This distinguishes Diary of a Murderer from his previous few books. Written as a journal, the short, punctual, detached, hasty musings of the author fit perfectly to theme; taking us into the cracking mind space of illness. There is no subtlety here, and this is just as well because subtlety wouldn’t be appropriate.

What I Have The Right To Destroy Myself and now Diary of a Murderer both gave its author, was a chance to be himself. To stop playing-up to his audience. All of Kim’s central characters are outcasts on the edges of ordinary life, but with these two books he doesn’t try so hard to universalise individual emotion. The numb disaffection of his prose is allowed its own space, unmolested by normalcy. Cold, callus, and inaccessibly fun, Kim’s literary style was always going to find a natural home with the internal thoughts of a suicide consultant or serial killer; those who hope for, and enjoy, the deaths of others.

And then just like that – with an overly-conceived, unwieldy, and yet satisfying twist – it ends prematurely and Diary of a Murderer breaks into short stories that feel more like lost ideas. Small, fractured, writing projects that our author couldn’t quite squeeze into a novel, and yet couldn’t bring himself to throw out. The less said about The Origin of Life and Missing Child the better, but then there is The Writer, and something delightful begins to happen.

Kim Young-ha is looking back on himself, and the unexpected success of his first book, with the harsh, sceptical eyes that he ordinarily applies to other people. He talks about the blur of writing, of being engulfed by a muse, of rediscovering himself in his work – “I hadn’t experienced such heights of productivity since my debut.” And he does it all with a raw honesty, “an unpublishable, erotic, experimental, disjointed novel, I didn’t need to reread what I’d written, and consistency of character wasn’t important”.

Asked by a young love interest what he does for a living, our narrator-author responds “I used to be pretty famous”. He talks her through the details of his first novel, and she looks back at him with an unimpressed glare, “Never heard of it”. But make no mistake, Kim Young-ha is back in his pomp here, and new audiences – not old enough to understand why he is famous – will at least begin to understand why he is so transfixing, and such an important counter-point to the Korean literary scene. (Even his Korean-to-English translator, Krys Lee, has dramatically upped her game from her previous effort on I Hear Your Voice).

Then the reader – with growing mood and excitement – gets to the last page, and is hit with “I slowly opened my eyes”. The moment crushes you. No! He isn’t going to do it! Surely not! But it continues like an all-to-obvious practical joke, and – in disbelief – you begin looking around for the hidden cameras. Kim is sometimes a little crude and loves to smuggle in a twist-for-twists sake, but certainly even he couldn’t possibly finish such a promising piece of writing with the child’s cliché of ‘then I woke up, and it was all a dream’. But, he, inexplicably, does!

If I wasn’t in a public café at the time, I would have thrown the book across the room. Do yourself a favour, and save yourself the aggravation, tear this last page out without reading it. Finish the book a few paragraphs early. Don’t let Kim Young-ha destroy your spirit and literary sensibility – forever a bad writer producing wonderful books.

Slippery Pages – Review of Hwang Jungeun’s ‘I’ll Go On’

It is in the language of applause that the first alarm bells go off. Talk of subtlety and hidden meaning are not problems in themselves, but when reviewers are also regularly calling it bold, and are widely divergent on what that meaning actually is, then at the very least something unusual is happening. A soft, fluffy story is also a profound attack on the ravages of capitalism. The tender, overly-emotional conversations are rugged criticisms of modern life. The petty, struggling characters are symbols for mystical nuance. Haunting yet mundane, beautiful yet non-descript, subtle yet gritty, messy yet clean, light yet dark, delicate yet rough, lyrical yet basic. Hwang Jungeun’s second novel, I’ll Go On, is none of these things; and so this confusion tells its own story.

The first truthful thing that can be said about I’ll Go On is that it’s not very good; and certainly not as good as the author’s first book One Hundred Shadows. But this is an attempt at replication, or at least a continuation of style. Writing about love at the wrong end of Korean society is not new. What distinguished Hwang Jungeun was the disconnected build-up of tension, the haphazard threads that never really connect, the fringed love story, the asexuality of the female leads, contrasted with the desperate romance of circling men, the hopelessness of love, lives of simplicity and isolation, and a shamanistic overlay that avoids the pitfalls of feeling contrived. Jungeun lives in a forgotten world, where nothing ever properly manifests, nor is it even properly hinted at. From the outside, the reader finds themselves cheering on the peripheral characters, hoping that they can break into that miserable – and impervious – centre stage.

This type of writing won’t appeal to too many, but it does have an audience; most centrally Han Kang. It is not an exaggeration to say that Kang is Korea’s most prescient writer: the literary moments of Kim Young-ha, Shin Kyung-sook and Hwang Sok-yong have definitively waned over recent years, leaving Kang and her brand of dark, odd, tragedy, largely alone in the fame-induced world of Korean-English translation. When someone like this writes something like this about your book, you are an overnight success: “There is an unforgettable, curious beauty to be found here”. Hoisted to this platform, the problem comes when you look down in search of something new, and you try to unnecessarily force language to reveal what just isn’t there: “That’s how it generally is with Aeja’s stories. There as potent as a putrid peach or the most enthralling of poisonous spells.” Or “The food he cooked up had that elusive quality that could only be described as the presence of flavour.”

Jungeun now writes with a conscious understanding that she is being watched, and that a particular style is expected from her. So gimmicks appear, and the mental ticks of an author trying a little too hard begin to show up. Pregnancy takes on an early importance in I’ll Go On, yet instead of building it into the story, or opening up connected threads, Jungeun simply has the older sister repeat the thought over-and-over: “a dream foretelling pregnancy”, “wouldn’t a danpung leaf mean it’s a girl?”, “maybe it really was a pregnancy dream”, “Nana might be pregnant”, “Nana is pregnant”, “Is Nana pregnant”, “Nana might be pregnant”, “She was, in fact, Pregnant?”, “Or simply that she’s pregnant? Pregnant: Nana may be pregnant.” To get a proper feel for just how imposing this is, these selected references come from a single six page fragment of the book.

Nana, the younger sister, is the saving grace for this narrative. Her voice arrives at just the right time, disaffected and cold, but considerably more interesting and likeable than her sister Sora. The choice to have her speak in the third person – referring to herself by name – might have some value, but again it repeats much too often, becoming more of a nag than a genuine literary device. And marching forward, oblivious to this overbearing clang, the author is soon filling whole paragraphs with the echoes of sounds: swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish, swish; zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig, zig; sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa, sshaa. This is laborious, and a chore to get through – it comes across as an insult to the reader’s intelligence; an angry teacher committed only to rote learning because she doubts her students’ attention span, and their grasp on subtlety. Even as the story improves, it becomes harder to stomach.

In her exertion here, Jungeun explicitly gives away her most fundamental literary device: the promise of delayed satisfaction that never arrives. Ideas, characters, thoughts, emotions are always introduced in unsatisfyingly small tastes, and then abandoned, only for them to return later, still fleeting, still undeveloped, and often just a rehash of the original. Again though, now the game she is playing is all the more crude and obvious: “The conversation veered off course and I didn’t get a chance to ask if the dream was about her” and “I’d resolved to be upfront about it next time I saw her, but in the days that followed I found myself unable to broach the subject.” In One Hundred Shadows the romance is delayed from start to end, and the internal reflections play to the same pacing of the story. Now with I’ll Go On everyone’s lives unfold just as slow as before, while every thought is rushed impatiently onto the reader. The loops and disconnected pacing becomes so much at times that it feels like the entire narrative here could be reduced to a single, honest, five minute conversation between the central characters.

These missteps undercut the truth that Jungeun is, in fact, onto something here. Writing about the simple and the unglamorous in a society running desperately in the other direction certainly has its appeal. People on the dirty fringes reflecting on their precarious lives, their matter-of-fact acceptance of pain and discomfort, the slow and silent people whose constitutions just won’t let them join the race outside, the overwhelming tedium of it all; those with the time and isolation to think and reflect. Jungeun’s characters talk openly, and bravely, about themselves – ruminating over life while moping about the present moment – yet remain at an uncomfortable distance, leaving the reader in expectation and hope that more is happening behind the scenes, that the show continues despite them leaving the theatre. This is a poke at Proustianism, but looking inwards doesn’t automatically make something insightful.

Take the following (representative) semi-conscious ticks of language that might sound evocative until they are spoken out loud:

“I am not making this up.”

And

“I ask myself”

Or this type of lazy attempt to philosophise life, death and metaphysics.

“Are you dead or are you alive?

In certain moments, this is what I ask the moth.

Dead or alive.”

[Repeated again a few lines later] “Which are you: dead or living?”

Attempting to force shamanistic nods where they don’t belong:

“Better if she’s not in the world

I am, and will remain. Sora

I mean to end my days as Sora.

To become extinct.

The last of the tribe called Sora.”

Or simply thinking that obvious and childish hermeneutics can pass as something profound:

“This wont do, Nana tells herself.

Any more talk and Nana might burst into tears, and when Nana cries, Sora cries – which makes Nana cry in turn, and Sora will cry because now Nana’s crying , which will make Nana cry which makes Sora cry.”

And

“Naghi was small then, and young, though he’s not small any more, nor young. Nana and I were small then, too. But not now, we’re not kids any more.”

[And then later] “Nana and I were small. We’re not small any more.”

This backyard spiritualism might connect with the flow of One Hundred Shadows, but this is a very different book; without the horror-like imagery and relentless – yet uncertain – danger, this feels like a simple lack of concern; that the author has allowed her default, automatic self to pollute the story. The language lacks any trace of refinement, the philosophy is shallow, and it reads like an inside joke – significant only to the people involved in its manufacture. Perhaps the damage was done by that first early success. As the author is constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to clone the old recipe for changing taste buds and a new undercooked dish, so it seems are the publishers. Warning signs were there for everyone when I’ll Go On was marketed almost exclusively on the reputation of the previous book.

There is a darkness here that never arrives, a statement on materialism that is never spoken, and a collision of worlds that never make contact. Just like her characters, Hwang Jungeun fails to step forward, fails to leave history in its proper place, and fails to be genuine. Instead we have a trundling mess of a book and an exposed lesson in bad conceptual writing. Which opens up a question about the title: the phrase ‘I’ll go on’ is used regularly in the story, often as a way to exit a paragraph or section of text without first winding things up. It could mean ‘talk’, but at this stage of reader dissatisfaction if feels a lot more like ‘endure’. It all predictably ends on this note as well, by which stage the intended exclamation has entirely worn off; now void of all surprise and purpose. But it is welcome, if for nothing else than to shake away the final pages where – without any priming – dreamcatchers are being hung with serious intent, in-between discussions about dinosaurs and extinction, as if everything had been building inexorably to this moment; ending as it began: mundane.

The Samsung Wars – Review of Geoffrey Cain’s ‘Samsung Rising’

It begins with sulphur and fire, “angry, thick, green-gray smoke”. Phones are exploding and pockets are literally burning. Once loyal customers are gazing pensively at their still room-temperature Galaxy Note 7’s as if they are unpinned grenades – expensive, newly-minted, and ticking.

The public fear and panic is manageable, phones and batteries can be replaced, and the next product will clear the air. The laughter and mockery though – the damage to reputation – isn’t. It speaks to an old hangover – the cough at the end of a long cancer. The Republic of Samsung was again crumbling, under the weight of its own corporate culture.

This is where Samsung Rising kicks off, and it’s where our author, Geoffrey Cain, also enters the story. As a young, hopeful, foreign correspondent trying to look behind the manufacturing, behind the technical details and mistakes, and into the syndromic world that let it all happen. It’s an unspoken story that everyone seems to know their own small, limited part of, and for which everyone has a different name: “the Church of Samsung”, “the Samsung Way”, “the Republic of Samsung”.

A citizen of the Japanese empire, and a relatively lucky one at that, founder Lee Byung-chul stumbled home after a lengthy night of “gambling and dominoes”, looked down on his three sleeping children and suffered a collapse of conscience: “I’ve idled away my time. It’s time to set an aim to life”. He was 26 years old. The Three Star Shop (‘Samsung Sanghoe’) was soon launched, selling dried fish and vegetables. Then its grocery stores, breweries, newspapers, universities, sugar refineries, fabrication, banks, insurance companies, department stores, fertilizer, and semiconductors. Within a handful of years, Lee has travelled from delinquent stop-out to the richest man on the peninsula.

It’s a dubious tale, and it’s self-told with a soon-to-be-familiar spiritual loftiness. The Samsung machine wants us to believe that while for the rest of us rock bottom is a complete mess of dignity, morality and thought, they are built from sterner material. In Lee’s lowest moment he is still polished and clean; a walking, talking ubermensch preaching to the world quasi-religious gems like “in the future, one person will be feeding thousands more”.

Cain does an admirable job of not scoffing too loudly at this – leaving the space for his reader to indulge privately. It’s not just that Samsung Rising has more important targets in mind, but also a certain contextualisation: the truth of Samsung’s origin doesn’t matter as much as that the story is told, and told in this specific, calculated way.

Newly independent but firmly authoritarian, Lee “built his fortune” in Korea the only way possible, “using political savvy”. Which is a long way around saying ‘corruption’. And there is no escaping the dubious place that Samsung held at this time, the all-too-close relationship with government and national exploitation, but as Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee and certainly Chun Doo-hwan, are remembered for all their missteps, Samsung has walked through history – hand-in-hand with these men – and yet has done so sporting a proud, and largely untouchable, shine.

So the prescience here, and public relations campaign, deserves respect. It certainly takes some explaining. How is it possible that the same average citizen condemning the bribery of former President Park Geun-hye, is also so comfortable defending the company who paid the bribe, shouting proudly on the same street corner barricade “Samsung built this nation!”

Why, for that matter, is the nepotism between Park and her life-long friend, Choi Soon-sil, so unforgivable, but Vice Chairman of Samsung, Lee Jae-yong, can undercut his shareholders for personal gain and be welcomed back into the centrality of Korean life.

At every step, through every administration – authoritarian and democratic – Samsung was there in the shadows, watching, and participating in, the tragedies of the modern era. There were times that Samsung didn’t have much choice in this, held hostage so-to-speak (most notably by Park Chung-hee) by the nation-building whims of Korean leaders. But not many hostage takers reward their victims with anything other than freedom – what Samsung got for its cooperation was the wealth and resources of an entire nation.

Aristocracy has something to do with this, but not everything. The Lee family has kept close circles of marriage, tying business to political influence. But none of this comes close to touching the royal status of Park Geun-hye, as the daughter of former-leader Park Chung-hee, and someone whose mother was assassinated whilst serving as first lady. Yet all of this quickly turned liability when political scandal hit – ‘Korea’s Princess’ was accused of acting like a princess, and  “within weeks, President Park’s approval rating collapsed to 4 percent” and the “largest protests in the nation’s democratic history took place”.

But Samsung endured, in body and image. The rise and success of founder Lee Byung-chul is still a part of Korean folklore, young boys and girls hear about it in the same tones – and with the same constant echo – as they do Tangun, King Sejong, Commander Yi Sun-Shin, or Hong Gil-dong. And that was always the idea!

At some point early-on in the Samsung narrative, the Korean company became the Korean nation. Early advertising campaigns laid the ground – “fifty years with our minjok (a term that translates loosely to ‘Korean race’ or ‘racial nation’)”. This connects Samsung not with the South Korean republic, but with divided histories, an uncertain future, and with Koreans North of the 38th parallel. To hate Samsung is to hate Korea, and to hate yourself as a Korean… so no wonder the company has thrived so well!

What makes this even more remarkable is just how un-Korean Samsung are behind all the smiles and advertising. Despite nodding proudly to the minjok, Lee Byung-chul wanted it reformed, to show more “loyalty”, “patriotism”, and more “capacity for unity and diligent work”; he wanted it to be more “Japanese”. Even in 1968, once the foundation of Samsung was firmly established, Lee would “secretly bring in Japanese experts” to “teach my engineers”. And when this growing empire outlived its teacher (prevailing in the ‘Sony Wars’) it moved west to the United States in search of the design expertise and marketing techniques that it needed to challenge Apple.

If authenticity is a weakness of Samsung, ambition certainly isn’t. Behind it all is a strange, fanatical, cringe-worthy culture that worked wonders until it spectacularly didn’t anymore, and which resists change to this day. Cain speaks of an episode in 2010 where new recruits are seen lined up in battle formation, all wearing the “military dress of a French musketeer”, and cheering in unison “Youth with boiling blood, conquer the summer season”; a banner reading ‘PRIDE IN SAMSUNG’ hangs over a nearby hillside.

From Apple’s Steve Jobs, to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sony’s Akio Morita, the tech world has no shortage of eccentric leaders and cult-like employees, but none of it comes close to Samsung. Beyond the Hitler Youth-like display above, employees often start their days by watching thirty minute recorded sermons from the chairman, where he seems to spend less time on motivation and more on absolution, asking his employees to “examine their morality and rediscover their pasts.”

Written by a journalist, Samsung Rising is as comfortable as you would expect. The prose is appropriately invisible, chapters begin and are interlaced with personal stories, and the fuzzy technological and economic details are as clear as they are ever going to be. A large chunk of its Korean audience are sure not to like it though – Geoffrey Cain has laid out the rise and success of an extraordinary company, with all the mess, disgrace and ego un-redacted.

There will be an instinct out there to defend Samsung here, as one might a family member, someone who you owe so much to. And that is exactly why this book needed to be written, and perhaps could only be done so by an outsider looking in. We all know Samsung’s side of this argument, what their tint on their own history is… the other side needed telling; and how refreshing it is.

Stuck Inside - Review of Han Kang's 'White Book'

Han Kang will have to be slower and less deliberate in her next book. She will have to produce something that doesn’t first require a recognition of her fame before it can draw applause. Moments of eye-opening prose are not enough to sustain the wave she is on, and it’s a game of diminishing returns. Let’s hope our punk rock band turns its back on fame and the allure of the fawning crowds. Selling the mansion, they move back into their parent’s garage with nothing but the same instruments and motivation that got them started… and a little more coherence. No understanding that anything they write will be heard outside those walls; no money to be made, no glory, no awards. A return to art for its own sake. Let’s hope that the series of empty white pages at the end of this book is the last stunt before a return to the literature that made Han Kang so good in the first place.

Missiles and Miscalculation

There is plenty in this book, and plenty to like. The imagery of American pilots over North Korean skies recalling “the helpless feeling of watching the huge missiles powering up into space carrying huge nuclear weapons that the pilots knew were headed toward the United States” is hauntingly well done (even if the repeated use of the word ‘huge’ sticks in the throat). But more than anything, this is bold. It reaches for something difficult, and succeeds, and fails, in just the ways you might expect. For this, Jeffery Lewis both seems to know the limitations of his project, and then at times completely forgets what that project actually is. The personal 'testimony' of survivors is a good piece of literary craft, however it doesn’t blend as it should with the cold technical explanations throughout. And Lewis's attempts to slow-play his readers often doesn’t catch, as he tries to retroactively hint at what he has already told us is coming. Yet, in a strange way it all kind of works. The clumsy moments and the jagged edges, don’t take away too much from what this actually is – a missile expert talking us through an incredibly dangerous scenario. And the worst thing that can be said about this scenario, is also the best thing that can be said about this book – it is plausible.

Cutting History to Fit: A Study in Motivated Reasoning - Review of 'Korea Where the American Century Began'

“For my father (1928 - )” reads Michael Pembroke’s brief dedication, “who was there”. It is a raw, honest and principled motivation for writing a book… but not an intellectual one. ‘Korea: Where the American Century Began’, teases to do something impressive, but finds itself stuck in this first sentence; unable to kick free from the author’s antipathy toward what, and who, he blames for his father’s ‘being there’.

Pulling on the Stitches of Japanese Identity - Review of The Invitation-Only Zone

Across the coastlines of western Japan, starting in the 1970’s, a terrifying horror story was playing out. Lone fishermen weren’t coming home, women out on regular evening walks were lost forever, and young lovers were disappearing; engines still idling in their abandoned cars. Many of the vanished were dismissed as runaways, people deserting unwanted families for a new life, or even suicide. It wasn’t through incompetence that police forces failed to piece this together. Drawing a link between missing people, from different beaches, from different islands, sometimes hundreds of kilometres apart, just would have stretched credulity too far. And this still wouldn’t have got anyone to the implausible truth that the North Korean regime – directly guided by Kim Jong-il – was kidnapping Japanese citizens in the hope that they might become – or failing that help to train – his next generation of covert agents.

North Korean Confirmation Bias - Book Review of 'North Korean House of Cards: Leadership Dynamics Under Kim Jong-un'

With ‘North Korean House of Cards: Leadership Dynamics under Kim Jong-un’, Ken Gause blends old, established details, with large leaps of inference. And in doing so he falls into many of the same problems that other authors on the topic have done. Raw speculation doesn’t carry the same opportunity costs in North Korean studies as it does in other academic fields, for obvious reasons.