The story’s transitions aren’t always navigated as deftly as Kim intends. But his own empathetic gifts applied toward even...
A pair of alienated, hypersensitive South Korean boys seek solace, first from each other and then from the volatile subculture of their homeless, aimless peers.
Kim (I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, 2010, etc.), a prolific and eclectic Korean novelist, has found artistically fertile ground in the broken lives of his country’s misfits. And it would be difficult to imagine two more marginalized protagonists than Jae and Donggyu. Jae, born in Seoul's Express Bus Terminal to a homeless teenager, is destined from the start to repeat his mother's fate. A few years later, Jae, who's been adopted by a “hostess club” kitchen employee, meets Donggyu, the son of a police detective, and they forge a lifelong bond. Jae is the only person who can communicate with Donggyu, who for years will not say a word to anyone. Jae’s ability to be “the interpreter" of Donggyu's desires foretells psychic gifts that help him not only survive, but prevail when he’s compelled to forage through the city’s meaner streets of criminals, prostitutes, and teen runaways. Though Donggyu eventually shows his ability to speak, he remains more a watchful listener as he witnesses Jae’s transition from grubby, emaciated street rat to charismatic leader of one of the many motorcycle gangs racing and roaring with aimless swagger through the city’s streets. The source of Jae’s power seems to be his omnidirectional empathy not merely with people, but with animals, plants, and even inanimate objects. (“If a being experiences extreme suffering, I feel it, too," he says.) Donggyu, being the first to recognize Jae’s gifts, eventually becomes a motorcyclist himself, investing his less messianic but just as intense degree of empathy into the other wayward youths drawn into Jae’s circle. Like the shifting gears of an engine, Kim’s narrative changes perspectives from Donggyu’s first-person recollections to wide-screen omniscience to the point of view of an enigmatic police officer and even to that of the author himself, following a climactic motorcycle rally whose stunning denouement leaves behind many more questions than answers.
The story’s transitions aren’t always navigated as deftly as Kim intends. But his own empathetic gifts applied toward even the quirkiest and seediest of his characters evoke a vivid panorama of what life along the edges is like in Seoul.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-32447-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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