Customer Reviews

The Interpreter: A Novel

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

As other reviewers have noted, The Interpreter offers a third-person view of one Suzy Park whose life up to now can best be described as dysfunctional. She's survived two affairs with married men (although she's remarkably comfortable in her "mistress" role), dropped out a first-rate college, drifted from job to job, and kept only one friend.

Her present job, as a contract interpreter working for an agency, has held her longer than others. On one of her jobs, she translates for a witness who happens to know something about her parents, who died of gunshot wounds in 1995. She decides to investigate their death, her own past and the mysterious disappearance of her older sister Grace, who has always been distant.

Although the heroine is not especially appealing (you want to shake her and send her to a therapist, pronto), her life makes sense in terms of her background. A dysfunctional life comes from a supremely dysfunctional family -- with layers of mystery.

I had trouble putting the book down, although it had qualities of literary fiction and "girl books" as well as murder mystery. The author manages to give us a fresh view of New York, which has been the scene of so many novels. As I read I fondly remembered the Long Island Railroad and the stops on the Number 7 Queens line -- and the way they're counted out by riders. She also gives us a gritty but entertaining view of the Korean immigrant lifestyle as well as the realities of the legal proceedings where she translates. She reads between the lines and occasionally oversteps her boundaries, knowing immigrants have their own code and their own realities.

The sense of setting and the pacing make this novel succeed, despite the unsympathetic main character and the even less sympathetic romantic entanglements. Along with Suzy, we are exposed to one mystery after another. Why did the family move so often? Where did they get money to buy a store? Where are the family's citizenship papers? Why is the sister so aloof? Who murdered the parents and why?

Amazingly, Suki Kim ties up all these loose ends in the last two short chapters. The story behind the murder makes everything fit together, even the reason for her sister's aloofness (if we read between the lines).

The ending is satisfying but not happy. I am reminded of the oft-quoted psychological truth: People need meaning to be happy, but meaning doesn't necessarily bring happiness.

Heroine Suzy Park can now make a patterned quilt out of the scraps of her life. We're satisfied. She may never be.

This is an satisfying, entertaining first novel and mystery which explores New York City's Korean American immigrant and merchant community and their 1.5 Generation children. Told in the third person, we meet Suzy Park, on the cusp of turning 30, an ivy-educated, unfinished daughter of immigrant, Korean greengrocers in the Bronx. Estranged from her family, Suzy has aimlessly tripped from one adulterous relationship and temporary job to another. It is a life of unscented impermanence, with dull colored cars and a forever incomplete cathedral. She shuns her fellow 1.5 Generation members who strive in school. Her latest job is as an interpreter for the city court system. As an interpreter, she cannot take sides in court cases, but she is a keen observer and picks up the nuances and subtleties of languages, tones, and expressions. As the story unfolds, the reader will hope that Suzy not only interprets and transfers these depositions, but learns to interpret her own life choices and place in America. Although her parents were killed in a robbery of their store nearly five years ago, she never discusses the tragedy, not even with her friends or prying roommate. But when one client hints at some knowledge of a prior murder of greengrocers, Suzy picks up the trail of the mystery. Like the layers of a greengrocer's onion, the story unfolds as clues are unpeeled in each chapter. Was the robbery a murder? Why did the family move so often? Along the way, the author mixes in Korean culture, Nabokov, the INS, Japanese cinema, news radio-WINS, botany, van Gogh, and King Lear to create an absorbing, expeditious mystery.

First, the good points: Kim has talent as a writer; some of her descriptions shine, and you can see that there is clear potential somewhere in there. But not with this bummer of a book.

First of all, the character: Are we supposed to care about her? Brooding and morose, it's hard for the reader to sympathize with Suzy Park, the nondescript Korean American female protagonist who has all the emotions of a jellyfish. She seems to be an automaton, who, by her own admission, has an affair with a married man at the age of 20 followed by a whole string of affairs for the next decade as she seems to float through life in a comatose state. Why? What compels her? Kim goes into excessive descriptions into how emotionally catatonic, frozen and traumatized Suzy is without explaining why (she is often depicted feeling detached and spaced out--in the rain, in a feverish swoon, throwing up, during a deposition) that I wanted to shake her to her senses! And yet, we are asked to believe that her lover Michael, a disconnected character who calls her "babe" and uses glib "love talk" (with a laughably clumsy use of profanity) is madly in love with this dazed and confused woman. Yeah, right.

Secondly, the plot: it hints at being a quasi-murder mystery, but rather than follow any aspects of the crime genre, Kim merely uses it as a device to delve into narcissistic angst and excessive self-moping. The clues, hints, and encounters lead nowhere, like a bad David Lynch film. It functions instead as a meditation on detached, empty existence of an ethnic minority. Anyone expecting to get a satisfactory resolution to this "mystery" will be disappointed.Meanwhile, the promising theme about being an "interpreter" between two worlds is lost.

Other Korean American writers like Chang-rae Lee and Leonard Chang have used the ethnic minority as a "spy within the body" motif quite well. There could have been a good opportunity here for employing themes of trauma, mystery and immigration/ethnic identity, but Kim doesn't quite have an adequate plot or narrative structure to pull it off. At times, Kim also makes reference to American pop culture references as an example of Suzy's longing to assimilate, how she wants to have the ideal American TV family home and how her reality jars with that. But when she goes into needless descriptions of Manhattan and dialogues about Van Gogh, Nabokov, and Kurosawa's "Ran", it just comes off as pretentious and self-serving dribble.

"The Interpreter" delves into an unpleasant block of depression that goes nowhere. I guess the worst thing I could say about this book is that it's boring--imagine the movie "Memento" without the plot structure. But it's a debut novel. With a tighter, more cohesive plot and less heavy handed bleakness and pretentiousness, Kim may be able to pull off a better novel in the future.

The Interpreter is a psychological novel of stunning prose. The heroine is a 29 year old Korean woman who works as an interpreter in the court system. While the reader travels through her mind, overhearing her reflections on her murdered parents, her estranged sister and her many loves, the reader is also traveling into a dark terrain: the Korean underworld as it exists today in New York. Suki Kim's language is poetic: a stream of consciousness -- fearless and without sentiment -- that bores into the mind of the heroine. The Interpreter is a very impressive literary debut.

This is an interesting and suspenseful novel in the 'noir' tradition.

A young Korean woman is estranged from her parents. During this period of estrangement, her parents are violently murdered. She becomes lost, dropping out of Barnard College to become an interpretor, primarily for legal cases. While she is working as an interpretor on one case she finds out that her parents' murder might be more complex than she had believed. This leads her to contact her sister to whom she has not spoken since her parents' funeral.

Aspects of cultural heritage, assimilation and individuation are explored through one woman's lonely journey. I recommend this book.

I enjoyed Kim's novel because it mixed genres -- the "immigrant" novel and the detective novel. The character of Suzy is paradoxicallly intense and detached, full of her own unsolved mysteries, and is our compelling guide to worlds not often explored in recent literature. The blending of genres also allows for both exploring and exploding stereotypes of Asians in America -- Suzy's search for the reasons for her parents' deaths is simultaneously a search for how she fits into this new world they have brought her to, for how she can move beyond the "inscrutable" "Suzy Wong" stereotype into being a fully functional citizen of that world.

I loved this book. Normally, I do not prefer mystery novels but 'The Interpreter' caught me right from the first page. The problem with many mystery novels is that although they are interesting, they lack style. Such is not the dilemma with this book. Suki Kim's intertwining plot coupled with her poetic writing style makes this reviewer recommend this book highly to all readers. The only drawback is that it kept me up for most of the night; consequently, I was late to work.

This book is amazing. I easily fell in love with the main character, Suzy, a Korean born immigrant living in the United States. I'm not good with reviews, but this book is absolutely captivating! If you are into Asian American literature or Korean culture, please consider this book!

I bought this book after reading Kim's piece in the NY Review of Books, which is incredible. This book is cross-genre so it is going to bother folks who want it to be one way or the other. The author tackles complex issues in an accessible, page-turning manner. Nonetheless, Kim shirks a happy ending at the risk of alienating a mainstream following. It is a pretty move gutsy for her, so, in addition to being well written, this boldness earns her high marks.

The language in this novel haunted me, and keeps haunting me weeks after reading it. It is as interior and quiet and stark as something by Jose Saramago. Really, a beautiful and thrilling book.