I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest Original) [Paperback]

Young-ha Kim (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 2007 | Series: Harvest Original

In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same woman—Se-yeon—who tears at both of them as they all try desperately to find real connection in an atomized world. A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the edges of their lives as he tells of his work helping the lost and hurting find escape through suicide. Dreamlike and beautiful, the South Korea brought forth in this novel is cinematic in its urgency and its reflection of contemporary life everywhere—far beyond the boundaries of the Korean peninsula.  Recalling the emotional tension of Milan Kundera and the existential anguish of Bret Easton Ellis, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself achieves its author’s greatest wish—to show Korean literature as part of an international tradition. Young-ha Kim is a young master, the leading literary voice of his generation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Korean novelist Kim's tantalizing 1996 debut novel concerns a calculating, urbane young man who makes a business of helping his clients commit suicide. The narrator's favorite painting, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat, encapsulates his outlook—to be detached and cold, an approach reflected in his account of a recent client who was romantically involved with two brothers (called C and K). The woman, Se-yeon, is a young, spacey, lollipop-sucking drifter who first hangs out with K before bedding C. Cab-driver K and video artist C become obsessed with Se-Yeon, who looks (to them) like Gustave Klimt's Judith. Judith, as they subsequently refer to her, later wanders off into a snowstorm, never to be seen by the brothers again. However, in this eerie, elliptical narrative, Judith reappears as the narrator's client. Moreover, Judith morphs into other objects of desire, such as a woman from Hong Kong the narrator meets in Vienna and an elusive performance artist named Mimi whom C films. Kim's work is a self-conscious literary exploration of truth, death, desire and identity, and though it traffics in racy themes, it never devolves into base voyeurism. (July)
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From Booklist

Kim's first novel reeks of 1990s South Korea, whose rising generation was the first to enjoy the freedoms and the attendant anomie of a wealthy society. There are three male and three female protagonists. The men are the narrator and brothers C, a video artist, and K, a taxi driver. The women are Judith (so-called by C, after the biblical heroine as painted by Gustav Klimt), whom K beds first (in C's apartment) but loses to C; a woman the narrator meets in Vienna; and performance artist Mimi, averse to cinematic media but willing to have C tape her. It is eventually disclosed that Judith and Mimi are clients of the narrator, who writes novels, perhaps including this one, but maintains a sideline in promotive rather than preventive suicide counseling. As bleak, chilling, and economically written as Stephen Crane's 1890s classics Maggie and George's Mother, though with characters miles up the economic scale from Crane's, Kim's deadpan, elliptical story is even more like the enigmatic love (?) stories of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, whose work must be watched as raptly as Kim's must be read. Mesmerizing. Olson, Ray

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Product Details

• Paperback: 132 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; Tra edition (July 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156030802
• ISBN-13: 978-0156030809
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #562,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in 1968, Kim Young-ha kicked off his writing career with his first novel "I have the right to destroy myself", which won him the much-coveted Munhak-dongne prize in 1996. Since then, he has gained a reputation as the most talented and prolific Korean writer of his generation, publishing five novels and four collections of short stories.

Kim's novels and stories focus on articulating a new mode of sensitivity to life's thrills and horrors as experienced by Koreans in the ever-changing context of a modern, globalized culture. In his search for a literary style, as is often the case with internationally renowned post-modern novelists, Kim attempts to embark on exhilarating and provoking crossing of the boundaries of high and low genres of narratives. His historical novel "Black Flower" tells the story of the first generation of the Korean diaspora forced into slave labor in a Mexican plantation and later involved in a Pancho Villa-led military uprising in a style. Sources of inspiration for this novel came from classical "Bildungsroman", stories of sea trips as illustrated by the popular film Titanic, ethnography of religion, as well as Korean histories of exile and immigration. Another instance of Kim's fabulously mixed style is found in "The Empire of Light", his fourth novel, in which he raises the question of human identity in a democratic and consumerist Korean society by presenting a North Korean spy and his family in Seoul in the manner of a crime fiction combined with a truncated family saga and naturalist depiction of everyday life. The novel was published in the United States under a different title, "Your Republic Is Calling You" in 2010.

Each of Kim's novels has received acclaims from both critics and readers alike, and most have earned him major awards. In 2004--his "grand slam" year--he won three of the most prestigious literary prizes in Korea. With some 20 of his novels and stories being translated into more than 10 languages, he has begun to be recognized by critics overseas as well as in his country as representative of a literary breakthrough that occurred in the wake of democratization and post-industrialization in South Korea.

Kim began to earn his international recognition with a French translation of his first novel, "I have the right to destroy myself", which was published by Philippe Picquier in February 1998; the novel is set to be published in nine other languages, including English and German. A French version of "The Empire of Light" came out early in 2009 and gained favorable attention from such leading newspapers as Le Monde and Liberation.

As a young Korean master of storytelling, Kim is especially popular with Korean film directors, who have found in his works to be a repository of plots and characters that make for superb film-making. Two films have already been based on his fiction, and the cinematic adaptation of The Empire of Light is currently in progress. His latest novel, The Quiz Show, was also made into a musical in 2009.

Kim previously worked as a professor in the Drama School at Korean National University of Arts and on a regular basis hosted a book-themed radio program. In autumn 2008, he resigned all his jobs to devote himself exclusively to writing.

Currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the City of New York, he lives in New York City, USA.

http://kimyoungha.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beware of strangers in art galleries, July 19, 2007

By 

Katherine V. Molina "kvm" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

This was a neat little find...also one of the more viscerally disturbing books I've read in a while. Dark, clear, spare writing and a very smooth translation. It scared the heck out of me the first time I read it, and so I started over and read it again. Check it out.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I really liked this book., July 26, 2007

By 

Lisa I. Fair "(Her daughter, Rebecca)" (Illinois) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

When I think about it "objectively" this book really wasn't THAT great. Normally I would rate it 4 or even 3 stars, but I just really enjoyed this book. When I first looked at it I thought "Oh, another book with death and sex. How 'deep.'" but something compelled me to read it, and it was great! The writing was simple, which I love because it frees one's mind to analyze the text. Clearly, there was a lot of thought and planning put into the structure of the book. Kim has a wonderful way of interleaving the stories that take place at different times which creates, as another reviewer stated, a "dream-like" effect. The transitions in time and to various parts of the story are seemless. This would be a wonderful book to analyze in full, and I certainly hope I have the time to do so! This is certainly an entertaining (though dark) book on any level -- for a light or indepth read.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Embracing One's Destiny, August 15, 2007

By 

Daitokuji31 (Black Glass) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

Young-Ha Kim's slim novel I Have the Right to Destroy Myself opens with the nameless narrator's description of a painting, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat. Murdered by the woman whose letter he was responding to, it is David's depiction of Marat's face that the narrator is attracted to because it expresses the perfect balance hatred and understanding of what fate befell him. It is this serenity expressed in Marat's dead visage that the narrator tries to bring to his own work. A well-educated man who enjoys travel and art, the narrator has quite a bizarre profession: He suggests to his clients to take a form of action that society would normally object to. To a seventeen-year-old girl who is raped nightly by her father he suggests through his hotline that she take his life. However, the cases that truly interest him are those who have truly given up hope but who are grasping at the last threads of hope. The nameless narrator in his own kind, gentle way tells his clients that they should forget these threads of hope and give themselves over to death and he, with his trusty laptop, has a number of methods to aid them in their search for peace.

Besides our nameless narrator, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself also revolves a love triangle consisting of the brothers C and K and their lady friend Se-yeon. K, a taxi driver, was the first to meet Se-yeon when she worked as a bargirl and C, a mixed media artist, met the girl on the day of his mother's funeral when he discovered K and Se-yeon making love on his couch. C quickly falls for Se-yeon because of the time and care that she gives sucking on lollipops and the two begin to see each other. However, this relationship is far from stable and one night during a massive snowstorm, things truly begin to break apart.

The trio of C, K, and Se-yeon, also called Judith because of her resemblance to the Judith within Gustav Klimt's painting of the same name, are later joined by a couple of other characters, a woman from Hong Kong who gets dreadfully sick when she drinks water and Yu Mimi, another artist who uses her mane of hair as her brush, making for a quite interesting cast whose main connection is the death obsessed narrator. Because of the novel's brevity the characters are not completely fleshed out, but they are interesting enough and Kim's skill as an author allows the reader to know enough about each character in a few sentences to keep the reader from being too much in the dark.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is it references to art and film. As I have already mentioned in this review, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat and Gustav Klimt's Judith play important roles in this novel and Eugène Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus which moves the nameless narrator because of the stoic way in which Sardanapalus accepts his fate by first having all that is dear to him destroyed. Although the references to these paintings might make the book seem a bit highbrow it its art references, but it also mentions cheesecake/beefcake fantasy artist Boris Vallejo and it also mentions a couple of films: Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise and Michael Gottlieb's Mannequin. This mixture of high and lowbrow is almost a bit disconcerting especially when the narrator puts a philosophical spin on Mannequin, but it does raise a few issues about art and identity. One of the methods the narrator uses to find victims is to discover what kind of music they listen to and what kind of art they prefer. By viewing these various patterns of consumption he tracks down prospective clients for his suicide services. These patterns of consumption also bring up the issue of identity as a construct of material goods made available to the consumer instead of the creation of one's own being.

Clocking in at 119 pages, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself makes for a quick but highly reflective read. Although the title might make one think at first that the book might be quite gory, that idea is nothing further from the case. Instead, the book takes on a highly controversial topic and instead of demonizing it almost condones it for those who believe they have reached their end because suicide is the ultimate way in which one can take control of one's own life.