Violets

February 1, 2022
The English translation of an early work by the author of The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (2015) and Please Look After Mom (2011). One of South Korea's most celebrated writers, Shin captured the attention of Anglophone readers when she won the Man Asian Literary Prize. This slender novel begins in the early 1970s with the birth of a baby girl--unwanted because of her sex--in a small village. Oh San's family has little social status, and she and her mother move deeper into the margins after San's father disappears. As a young woman, San moves to Seoul. Her real dream is to become a writer or just work at a publishing house, but she is willing to settle for work as a word processor operator. When even this modest goal proves unattainable, San starts working in a flower shop. She meets a woman named Su-ae--who is as bold and impetuous as San is cautious and reserved--and falls for an unnamed photographer. Shin is known for revealing the ways in which her culture oppresses and isolates people--especially women. With San, she has created a protagonist who is professionally thwarted and incapable of forming attachments. San accepts Su-ae's friendship, but she also pushes the other woman away. San becomes obsessed with a man she barely knows because he offers her a couple of compliments. At the same time, her desire for him is tangled up with the still-raw feelings she has from being rejected by her only childhood friend after a brief intimate moment. Throughout these travails, though, San remains something of a cypher--inaccessible not just to the people around her, but also to the reader. The violent phantasmagoria of the story's climax reinforces the sense that San is more a symbol of modern alienation than a fully developed character. Overly reliant on sentimentality and shock.

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February 14, 2022
Man Asian Literary Prize winner Shin (Please Look After Mom) takes a disturbing and evocative look at an isolated young woman. Oh San was born unwanted in rural South Korea, and her father abandons the family shortly after. Ostracized and lonely, San’s only friend during her school years is neighbor Sur Namae, but their friendship ends suddenly and violently after a moment of romantic intimacy, a rejection San never recovers from. At 22, dreaming of becoming a writer, she works at a flower shop in Seoul, where she befriends the owner’s niece, Su-ae. The two young women become roommates, and the worldlier Su-ae teaches San how to deal with plants and aggressive customers. However, their relationship becomes strained after a photographer shows up to take photos of violets for a magazine. The photographer compliments San and takes photos of her as well, which initially makes her feel uneasy, but leads to an obsession with him. In one of her bids for attention, which makes her increasingly remote from Su-ae, she plants violets near his office, and the fixation ends up taking a dark turn. With sensuous prose intuitively translated by Hur, Shin vividly captures San’s tragic failure to connect with others. This is hard to put down.

Starred review from February 15, 2022
Mention of Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club sets this novel in 1999, when Oh San turns 23 that summer. She left her childhood village years ago, haunted by the memory of a best friendship's wrenching cleaving. After being repeatedly abandoned by her mother, who was discarded by San's father, San is surviving--not particularly living--in Seoul. Her name is a homonym for five (oh) three (san), as if she's as anonymous as a random number in a city of millions. After working as a salon assistant, San finds a job at a flower shop and begins to build a small community with the mute, older owner and his warmly energetic niece, Su-ae, who becomes San's roommate. Su-ae drags San out for dawn swims and restaurant meals and shares mint-chocolate-chip ice cream for breakfast. And San suddenly, obsessively, falls in love. "Violet. Violence. Violator"--words San finds together in the dictionary, become a mantra and a warning of what's to come. Hur, who made his translated-novel debut with Shin's The Court Dancer (2018) and became an award-winning Korean-to-English powerhouse, returns to adroitly cipher her latest impressive import. With this trigger-warning-worthy tale, Man Asian Literary Prize-winning Shin delivers another meticulous, haunting characterization of an isolated young woman in crisis.

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