Customer Reviews

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest Original)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Let me first start by saying this is a very flawed novel, there is not a lot of character development, and it is rather brief, but this work does have its merit. The author does of a very good job of convincing you that there are situation in which it would be better for a person to kill themselves than live their lives in constant pain. While I would'nt say this a classic work, it does add something important to the discussion about euthanasia.

I have perhaps spent too long thinking on this book, but I have been struggling with how to approach it--with, even, my own thoughts on it in general. I know I have mentioned before that I am not necessarily a fan of contemporary fiction, be it Korean or otherwise; in order to enjoy it, I feel that a contemporary work must lack a certain feeling of pretentiousness. It seems as though so many contemporary authors know that they are doing something "different," and want to be praised for that difference; they are perhaps certain that they will "blow your mind." It's as though they panhandle to the sort of twenty-something that claims to have "really understood Lolita," or dismiss other works due to the popularity of the author, as opposed to the content or general worth of the work. It's a sort of falsehood that I've seen everywhere in post-college individuals, and it's rather grating. It's as though authors are writing for shock value, and the readers are eating it up. I feel as though it's a great fault of mine that I've become so judgmental of contemporary fiction, and yet I can't help but indulge the mental rolling of my eyes that seems to occur any time some author finds a new, "artistic" way to describe sex.

Good contemporary fiction, however, is as wonderful as it is rare. An author that can shine through and depict his/her story in an honest and genuinely creative way is a true artist, and I'm happy to see that they are still around. I just wish that there were more of them.

That, I suppose, sums up my view on contemporary fiction.

And now for I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-ha Kim. The book follows a rather omniscient narrator though a dream-like Seoul as he navigates through the tangled lives of those who don't wish to live anymore, and those that surround them. He's a sort of dark mercy angel, never encouraging individuals to kill themselves, but aiding them when they do. He makes no claims on honesty, believing that fiction holds more merit than fact, so the reader has no guarantee that what he says is true. This effect, as well as his tone and the author's brilliant writing style, gives the book a mystical feeling, a sort of disconnect that remains whether the narrator focuses on his own life or the lives of two brothers and the woman they share in common.

Even after all of my thinking, I do not know quite what to say about this book. I fall back and forth from declaring it to be pretentious beyond a doubt to believing it to be honestly compelling. I think, however, that I can at last "assign" it a verdict.

I think that it is a very individual work that exists apart from the contemporary pretension that is rife on the markets. The book is indeed packed with shock value, existentialism, and other recipes for obtaining a modern audience, but I don't get the same sense of falseness from this work that I get from so many others. It feels genuine.

What lead me to this conclusion is the simple fact that I thought about the book for so long. It wasn't easy to approach; I rehashed the plot, characters, and writing style (which was brilliant in the English translation, and probably more so in Korean) constantly in my mind. The fact that the book kept me hooked for so long after I had read it leads me to believe that it was genuine in every respect.

My next step? I plan on reading Kim's other novels, as well as getting a hold of the original Korean texts. I want to gain what ever what lost in translation, and see where that takes me.

With its intriguing title that sells itself as edgy and artistic I ordered this book hopeful that Korea had finally come into its own with regards to contemporary literature. I wasn't as disappointed as I had prepared myself to be but I was still ultimately let down. The influences on Kim appear to be Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, J.G. Ballard, and to a lesser extent Haruki Murakami and maybe even Don Dellilo. Unfortunately, he's not in the same league with any of them.

I tend to find suicide a fascinating subject, so like I said, I was hopeful. But as the novel moved along it become obvious that the author lacked the skill to take me inside the despair of his characters. Instead, he hid behind the ambiguity of the avant-garde. If he had the poetic acumen to bring out the beauty of ambiguity this approach could have been tremendously successful. As it turned out he never really managed to hook the reader with plot, character development, or beautiful prose.

I go with three stars because there were some quality passages throughout. There were also episodes that would have made some fine short stories.

I'm still waiting.

Seems like yesterday when I first found I Have The Right To Destroy Myself in a used bookstore. It was completely by chance too. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and I ended up buying it. This book is one of the best books I've ever read. I was realistically dark and twisted. And that's not something just any writer can pull off. Young-Ha Kim is amazing. After I read it I soon got on this site to see if he had anymore books out.
That's when I found this one. I read it in about an hour and a half and it was great. There is actually two stories in this book. Photo Shop Murder and What Ever Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator?
The first story was good but I like the 2nd one way better!
If you think you ever had a bad day, then read What Ever Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator? It'll make you think twice. Trust me.

~Jesse

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest Original)

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest Original)

Overall, I thought the book was brilliant. It is one of the best works I have ever encountered. Kim's style reminded me of several other writers: Hemmingway, Shirley Jackson, and Jonathan Safran Foer. The relation to Hemmingway is obvious to anyone whose read the book. The succint, but poignant, sentences make the work easy to read, but no less powerful. The connection to Shirley Jackson occurred to me because of his focus on the aesthetic of mortality and morbidity. I reminded myself, just now, of a scene in the novel where C, one of the unnamed characters, is arguing with one of the three female characters over the desire or fear of immortality. Mankind, according to the narrator, fears the pure, unbounded nature of a white canvass. Getting back to the point; I was reminded of Foer because of two reasons: the use of aesthetic distance to observe the perverseness of human nature and the modern voice. Foer used a poor English translator as narrator for much of his work; Kim uses a narrator who is telling the story of his writing a story. Both men are modern authors, relatively close in age and both became successful at a very early age for writers (26F and 28K).




The only "named" characters in the work are three women. Unfortunately, I don't have my copy of the book with me and can only remember one name Se-yeon--which is just as well, since her story comprises 2/3 of the novel. Her love of Chupa Chups and fascination with the abstarct make her an intriguing and dangerous character. As anyone can read in the publisher's synopsis, Se-yeon, has two brothers (C. and K.) in love with her. In the end, however, everyone in the North Pole lives forever. The other two female characters will be named by what I comes to mind when I think of them: Vienna and Art. Vienna is unique in that she takes place only in the story of the unnamed narrator. Art, well, is an artist. All three women, and I found this to be delightful, are likened to Gustav Klimt's Judith (see picture at bottom of post). Each woman, seemingly, exemplifies (more than the other two) a single aspect of the portrait. Vienna, for example, is most easily likened to Judith's exposed left breast. C. and K. are two "unnamed" brothers. C. is a video artist and K. is a bullet-taxi driveer (Bang.) There is a lot of tension between the brothers.



The novel is a little jumpy at first. I say "at first" because it only takes a second to get used to the style. After a while, you don't notice the jumps at all. The story flows exceedingly well, especially for a translation. The jump remind me of...picking up a stack of polaroids that tell a few stories. You don't necessarily pick them all up in the correct order, but that only enhances the sensations. You might, for instance, pick up a picture of you at age three, and then pick up a picture of your burned house from age 8, and a picture of your grandmother's urn from age six. The story may not always flow in the correct chronological order, but it only serves to enhance the work.

Disclaimer/ Conclusion:



It could easily be argued that I've written a terrible review/summar of this, because I've hardly said anything about the work. The fear is, of course, that I will reveal too much. In the case of this novel, I fell that it is much better to leave you not knowing much, so you can find out on your own.

Being a steady reader of modern Japanese and Chinese authors, I gave this one a try. I was expecting something better developed than what this turned out to be.

This is really no more than a short novella - the 119 pages (not the 132 shown in the Product Details) are printed in a large font with generous margins. By the time you've read the Product Description, Editorial Reviews, Customer Reviews and excerpt, you've almost read the book.

It was an interesting story line and written in today's typical Oriental (for want of a more precise term) post-modern style. A "book" needs to have more to offer than Kim gave in this effort. It's doubtful that I will read more by him.