I think this book is worth your time. But I think it is also worth tempering your expectations against the way the book has been advertised, especially in its English translation. For example, according to the inside of the hardcover dust jacket this is presented as the story of “a thirtysomething ‘millenial everywoman … at the center of our global #MeToo movement.’” I want to gently push back on this marketing copy as I think the novel and the characters rise above that of archetype and stereotype.
There can be something flattening about how the everyday indignity of sexism and discrimination is unintentionally smoothed over when described as “universal.” When discrimination happens to you, what can be so shattering is how excruciatingly individual and direct that pain can feel; how hard it can be to put what just specifically happened to you into words, let alone speak of it to others; finally, it is astonishing how difficult it can be for others to truly understand in a meaningful way what you, as an individual, went through: This is the experience that Cho Nam-Joo attempts to capture in this novel and one I feel the author succeeds in doing.
You are never left in doubt that this is a novel about Kim Jiyoung, and as you read, you will be told more about her older sister Kim Eunyoung, her mother Oh Misook, her grandmother Koh Boonsoon, and more. The circle of women in her life shape and inform, guide and restrict, challenge and sometimes even seem to possess her as their lives unfold and fold into each other’s. This is not a novel full of exquisite prose and brutal interiority that delves deep into the stream-of-consciousness of our central character. It is not slow or meditative. It is a blunt book. The narrative does not dawdle and is structured to move quickly across several periods of Kim Ji Young’s life labelled “childhood,” “early adulthood,” and (tellingly) “marriage.”
In the English translation by Jamie Chang, the plot of the novel carries an urgency and reads as taut like a spring, uncoiling as you read it. The story presents a steady, ceaseless stream of individual, highly personal episodic events from Kim Ji Young’s life as well as the other women in her life: Moments where their status as a woman was used by others to truncate a dream, bring them fear, make them uncertain, to be imposed on them by another as a way to reduce their ambitions or their agency. These moments begin in slow waves at first. And at a certain point, the narrator even begins to cite statistics from the likes of the Economist, or the Ministry of Labor, or Statistics Korea at the end of a narrative event, in the same manner as one might add an underscore or italics for emphasis. By the end, these moments arrive almost ceaselessly, one after the other. I certainly felt overwhelmed as a reader.
At 163 pages, I was able to finish the slim, hardcover version in a single sitting, on a quiet Friday. The ending of the novel, which I leave for you to discover, made me feel more acutely than ever the challenges we have in lasting empathy or understanding. The novel shows how easy it is, for anecdotes or accounts of suffering to induce a moment of clarity, and empathy, to bemoan the circumstances. It also shows how easy it is to revert to the mean, to proscribe a platitude, to once more slip into a norm of everyday inequity. I found this book to be a source of many good conversations, and an opportunity to discuss our individual experiences, and made me hope for more lasting awareness of our capacity to discriminate – unintentional or not – but also our ability to be better.
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This novel is worth your time. It is more than a collection of archetypes of discrimination.
Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2020
I think this book is worth your time. But I think it is also worth tempering your expectations against the way the book has been advertised, especially in its English translation. For example, according to the inside of the hardcover dust jacket this is presented as the story of “a thirtysomething ‘millenial everywoman … at the center of our global #MeToo movement.’” I want to gently push back on this marketing copy as I think the novel and the characters rise above that of archetype and stereotype.There can be something flattening about how the everyday indignity of sexism and discrimination is unintentionally smoothed over when described as “universal.” When discrimination happens to you, what can be so shattering is how excruciatingly individual and direct that pain can feel; how hard it can be to put what just specifically happened to you into words, let alone speak of it to others; finally, it is astonishing how difficult it can be for others to truly understand in a meaningful way what you, as an individual, went through: This is the experience that Cho Nam-Joo attempts to capture in this novel and one I feel the author succeeds in doing.You are never left in doubt that this is a novel about Kim Jiyoung, and as you read, you will be told more about her older sister Kim Eunyoung, her mother Oh Misook, her grandmother Koh Boonsoon, and more. The circle of women in her life shape and inform, guide and restrict, challenge and sometimes even seem to possess her as their lives unfold and fold into each other’s. This is not a novel full of exquisite prose and brutal interiority that delves deep into the stream-of-consciousness of our central character. It is not slow or meditative. It is a blunt book. The narrative does not dawdle and is structured to move quickly across several periods of Kim Ji Young’s life labelled “childhood,” “early adulthood,” and (tellingly) “marriage.”In the English translation by Jamie Chang, the plot of the novel carries an urgency and reads as taut like a spring, uncoiling as you read it. The story presents a steady, ceaseless stream of individual, highly personal episodic events from Kim Ji Young’s life as well as the other women in her life: Moments where their status as a woman was used by others to truncate a dream, bring them fear, make them uncertain, to be imposed on them by another as a way to reduce their ambitions or their agency. These moments begin in slow waves at first. And at a certain point, the narrator even begins to cite statistics from the likes of the Economist, or the Ministry of Labor, or Statistics Korea at the end of a narrative event, in the same manner as one might add an underscore or italics for emphasis. By the end, these moments arrive almost ceaselessly, one after the other. I certainly felt overwhelmed as a reader.At 163 pages, I was able to finish the slim, hardcover version in a single sitting, on a quiet Friday. The ending of the novel, which I leave for you to discover, made me feel more acutely than ever the challenges we have in lasting empathy or understanding. The novel shows how easy it is, for anecdotes or accounts of suffering to induce a moment of clarity, and empathy, to bemoan the circumstances. It also shows how easy it is to revert to the mean, to proscribe a platitude, to once more slip into a norm of everyday inequity. I found this book to be a source of many good conversations, and an opportunity to discuss our individual experiences, and made me hope for more lasting awareness of our capacity to discriminate – unintentional or not – but also our ability to be better.
Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2020
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2020
There can be something flattening about how the everyday indignity of sexism and discrimination is unintentionally smoothed over when described as “universal.” When discrimination happens to you, what can be so shattering is how excruciatingly individual and direct that pain can feel; how hard it can be to put what just specifically happened to you into words, let alone speak of it to others; finally, it is astonishing how difficult it can be for others to truly understand in a meaningful way what you, as an individual, went through: This is the experience that Cho Nam-Joo attempts to capture in this novel and one I feel the author succeeds in doing.
You are never left in doubt that this is a novel about Kim Jiyoung, and as you read, you will be told more about her older sister Kim Eunyoung, her mother Oh Misook, her grandmother Koh Boonsoon, and more. The circle of women in her life shape and inform, guide and restrict, challenge and sometimes even seem to possess her as their lives unfold and fold into each other’s. This is not a novel full of exquisite prose and brutal interiority that delves deep into the stream-of-consciousness of our central character. It is not slow or meditative. It is a blunt book. The narrative does not dawdle and is structured to move quickly across several periods of Kim Ji Young’s life labelled “childhood,” “early adulthood,” and (tellingly) “marriage.”
In the English translation by Jamie Chang, the plot of the novel carries an urgency and reads as taut like a spring, uncoiling as you read it. The story presents a steady, ceaseless stream of individual, highly personal episodic events from Kim Ji Young’s life as well as the other women in her life: Moments where their status as a woman was used by others to truncate a dream, bring them fear, make them uncertain, to be imposed on them by another as a way to reduce their ambitions or their agency. These moments begin in slow waves at first. And at a certain point, the narrator even begins to cite statistics from the likes of the Economist, or the Ministry of Labor, or Statistics Korea at the end of a narrative event, in the same manner as one might add an underscore or italics for emphasis. By the end, these moments arrive almost ceaselessly, one after the other. I certainly felt overwhelmed as a reader.
At 163 pages, I was able to finish the slim, hardcover version in a single sitting, on a quiet Friday. The ending of the novel, which I leave for you to discover, made me feel more acutely than ever the challenges we have in lasting empathy or understanding. The novel shows how easy it is, for anecdotes or accounts of suffering to induce a moment of clarity, and empathy, to bemoan the circumstances. It also shows how easy it is to revert to the mean, to proscribe a platitude, to once more slip into a norm of everyday inequity. I found this book to be a source of many good conversations, and an opportunity to discuss our individual experiences, and made me hope for more lasting awareness of our capacity to discriminate – unintentional or not – but also our ability to be better.
This novel is worth your time. It is more than a collection of archetypes of discrimination.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2020
I think this book is worth your time. But I think it is also worth tempering your expectations against the way the book has been advertised, especially in its English translation. For example, according to the inside of the hardcover dust jacket this is presented as the story of “a thirtysomething ‘millenial everywoman … at the center of our global #MeToo movement.’” I want to gently push back on this marketing copy as I think the novel and the characters rise above that of archetype and stereotype.Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2020
There can be something flattening about how the everyday indignity of sexism and discrimination is unintentionally smoothed over when described as “universal.” When discrimination happens to you, what can be so shattering is how excruciatingly individual and direct that pain can feel; how hard it can be to put what just specifically happened to you into words, let alone speak of it to others; finally, it is astonishing how difficult it can be for others to truly understand in a meaningful way what you, as an individual, went through: This is the experience that Cho Nam-Joo attempts to capture in this novel and one I feel the author succeeds in doing.
You are never left in doubt that this is a novel about Kim Jiyoung, and as you read, you will be told more about her older sister Kim Eunyoung, her mother Oh Misook, her grandmother Koh Boonsoon, and more. The circle of women in her life shape and inform, guide and restrict, challenge and sometimes even seem to possess her as their lives unfold and fold into each other’s. This is not a novel full of exquisite prose and brutal interiority that delves deep into the stream-of-consciousness of our central character. It is not slow or meditative. It is a blunt book. The narrative does not dawdle and is structured to move quickly across several periods of Kim Ji Young’s life labelled “childhood,” “early adulthood,” and (tellingly) “marriage.”
In the English translation by Jamie Chang, the plot of the novel carries an urgency and reads as taut like a spring, uncoiling as you read it. The story presents a steady, ceaseless stream of individual, highly personal episodic events from Kim Ji Young’s life as well as the other women in her life: Moments where their status as a woman was used by others to truncate a dream, bring them fear, make them uncertain, to be imposed on them by another as a way to reduce their ambitions or their agency. These moments begin in slow waves at first. And at a certain point, the narrator even begins to cite statistics from the likes of the Economist, or the Ministry of Labor, or Statistics Korea at the end of a narrative event, in the same manner as one might add an underscore or italics for emphasis. By the end, these moments arrive almost ceaselessly, one after the other. I certainly felt overwhelmed as a reader.
At 163 pages, I was able to finish the slim, hardcover version in a single sitting, on a quiet Friday. The ending of the novel, which I leave for you to discover, made me feel more acutely than ever the challenges we have in lasting empathy or understanding. The novel shows how easy it is, for anecdotes or accounts of suffering to induce a moment of clarity, and empathy, to bemoan the circumstances. It also shows how easy it is to revert to the mean, to proscribe a platitude, to once more slip into a norm of everyday inequity. I found this book to be a source of many good conversations, and an opportunity to discuss our individual experiences, and made me hope for more lasting awareness of our capacity to discriminate – unintentional or not – but also our ability to be better.
Images in this review
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Top reviews from other countries
James Tormey
An important read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 17, 2020Amazon Customer
Frustrating, honest and brilliant.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 20, 2020
Zorini Lungṭau
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 ❤
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on March 2, 2020
Zorini Lungṭau
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on March 2, 2020
It also talks about menstruation, maternity leave, unequal pay and unequal division of unpaid labour, spy cams and pornography, child care, and the insensitivity of the general public towards these matters.
It will definitely make it to my favourite books of all time.
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