I am back at Strange Horizons with a review of The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim, translated from Korean by Sean Lin Halbert. This is the tale of an unusual apocalypse, as mysterious dark orbs proliferate across the world, absorbing everyone who gets in their way. Our protagonist is Jeong-su, who may not seem to be cut out for surviving an apocalypse, but does so anyway. It turns out that the real danger in this novel lies on the inside.
I was really pleased to learn that Han Kang had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature yesterday. She has become one of my favourite writers that I’ve discovered during the lifetime of this blog. Indeed, she was the author of my ‘book of the year’ twice in a row. Her writing has a way of getting under my skin like few other authors’.
It also happens that I’ve reviewed all of Han’s books that have appeared in English translation to date, so this seems a good time to look back on what I thought of them. Here, then, are the links to my posts on Han Kang’s work:
The Vegetarian (2007, tr. Deborah Smith 2015) – reviewed for Shiny New Books.
Human Acts (2014, tr. Deborah Smith 2016) – reviewed on the blog.
From 2016, a few thoughts on Han Kang, Lionel Shriver, and a writer’s relationship to their material.
The White Book (2016, tr. Deborah Smith 2017) – reviewed on the blog.
Greek Lessons (2011, tr. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won 2023) – reviewed for Shiny New Books.
I don’t know why it happened, but there were times this year when I just fell out of the habit of reading. This is not what I want, and my aim for 2024 is to find my way back in – with this space to help. For now, though, I’m looking back on 2023. It didn’t feel right to do my usual countdown of twelve books, so instead I’ve picked out six favourites, in no particular order:
It sounds as though it will be whimsical: the tale of a woman who buys an orang-utan with the aim of raising it as a human. What it becomes, though, is a chilling exploration of the unbridgeable gap between one mind and another.
Whale (2004) by Cheon Myeong-kwan Translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim (2022)
I won’t pretend I always knew what I was reading with this book, but I do know I enjoyed it. Whale is a dance through recent Korean history, with trauma, violence, humour and magic all present in the stories of its larger-than-life characters.
Is Mother Dead (2020) by Vigdis Hjorth Translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund (2022)
Johanna returns to Oslo after almost thirty years, speculating intensely over what may have happened to her mother. What I found most striking about this novel is how it transforms our perception of Johanna without changing the essential tone of her narration.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this portrait of a man whose layers of gentility are literally stripped from him when he falls into the sea. I found it quite powerful, especially in how it highlights that the smallest things can be both significant and insignificant, depending on the viewpoint.
War with the Newts (1936) by Karel Čapek Translated from Czech by M. and R. Weatherall (1937)
A shape-shifting satire in which intelligent salamanders are first exploited by humans, and then rebel against them. I was pleased to find that the novel still has considerable bite, and appreciated that it couldn’t be reduced easily to a single metaphor or interpretation.
Time Shelter (2020) by Georgi Gospodinov Translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel (2022)
I love how the canvas of this novel widens, from a clinic that helps dementia patients by recreating the past, to a whole continent retreating into nostalgia. Time Shelter examines the dangers of becoming fixated on the past, and the narrator’s memory fails him, suggesting there is no shelter from time after all.
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There are my reading highlights of 2023. You can find my round-ups from previous years here:
Back in 2015, I read The Vegetarian by Han Kang (tr. Deborah Smith). I loved it, and went on to be my favourite book of the year. Human Acts was my favourite book of the following year, too. Han became a must-read author for me, which brings me to her latest book in translation.
Greek Lessons (tr. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won) concerns a language learner who’s lost the ability to speak, and a language teacher losing the ability to see. It’s about the intimacy of language, and how these two characters eventually forge a connection. I’m please to have reviewed it for Shiny New Books, which is also where I reviewed The Vegetarian.
The thought that kept returning to me as I read this book was: I don’t really know what I’m reading here, but I know I like it. Reading a few other reviews of Whale online has helped me to see it as a dance through recent Korean history, examining military dictatorship and the rise of capitalism through the stories of a few individuals.
I say ‘stories’ deliberately, because there’s a certain fairytale atmosphere to Cheon Myeong-kwan’s novel, with its hazy passage of time and the just-so tone of its narration (really well evoked in Chi-Young Kim’s translation).
The principal character is Geumbok, a woman from the mountains whose fortunes rise, fall, and rise again, until eventually she builds her own movie theatre in the shape of a whale. Geumbok’s story is intertwined with that of her daughter Chunhui, large and immensely strong, a brilliant brickmaker, unable to speak – except with an elephant whom she befriends.
There is great trauma and violence in Whale, but also moments of humour and touches of magic. This book is a kaleidoscope of interlocking stories, all painted larger than life.
If 2022 has taught me anything with regard to reading, it’s that I shouldn’t bother with firm reading plans! Over the year, I was a little frustrated that I couldn’t seem to get into my usual reading routine. I also had a sense that some of my reading cornerstones (such as the Goldsmiths Prize) weren’t chiming with me as they usually did. Whether that’s just a blip or a broader change in my taste, I’ll gain a better idea next year.
Whatever the case, I still read some grand books this year. Here is my usual informal countdown of the dozen that have flourished most in my mind:
12. Faces in the Crowd (2011) by Valeria Luiselli Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (2014)
My chance to catch up on a book I’ve long wanted to read, and it was worth the wait. A young woman’s life in Mexico City contrasts with her old life in New York, and with the novel she’s writing, and the life of the poet she’s writing about… Different, blurred layers of reality make this such a rush to read.
11. Standing Heavy (2014) by GauZ’ Translated from French by Frank Wynne (2022)
A novel about the changing experiences of Ivorian security guards in Paris, Standing Heavy is intriguingly pared back in its form. Three story-chapters capture the movement of history around the characters, and more fragmented observations deepen one’s sense of the book’s world. This is a short novel with a lot to say.
10. The Sky Above the Roof (2019) by Nathacha Appanah Translated from French by Geoffrey Strachan (2022)
This was a fine example of how a novel’s brevity can bring a distinctive atmosphere to familiar subject matter. Appanah focuses on a young man who’s been apprehended after a road crash, as well as his sister and mother – all three of them ill at ease with the world. This novel has an intensity that might easily be diluted in a longer work.
9. The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991) by Ágota Kristóf Translated from French by David Watson (1991) and Marc Romano (1996)
These two novels follow on from Kristóf’s The Notebook: I read them together, and they belong together here. Kristóf’s trilogy tells of two brothers displaced by war. There’s great trauma in the background, but emotions are kept distant. Geography and time are also flattened out, adding to the feeling of being trapped. The trilogy progressively undermines any sense of understanding the truth of what happened to the brothers, and therein lies its power for me.
8. Love (1997) by Hanne Ørstavik Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken (2018)
This novel is about a mother and son who live in the same space yet still in their own worlds. That theme is strikingly reflected in the writing, as the two characters’ stories merge into and out of each other repeatedly. Often, the pair seem closest emotionally when they’re separated physically. The ending is sharp and poignant.
7. The Sons of Red Lake (2008) by Zhou Daxin Translated from Chinese by Thomas Bray and Haiwang Yuan (2022)
Breaking the run of short, spare novels is a longer one that I enjoyed taking my time over. A woman returns to her childhood village, falls back in love with her childhood sweetheart, and finds her fortunes changing for better and worse. Zhou’s novel explores the effects of tourism and the temptations of power. I found it engrossing.
Some of the best writing I read all year was in this book. It’s a novel following the life of an African American woman from Chicago. She has aspirations for herself, but the reality turns out to be rather mixed. In the end, I found hope in Maud Martha, as its snapshot structure opened up possibilities beyond the final page.
5. Life Ceremony (2019) by Sayaka Murata Translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (2022)
I’m not sure that anyone combines the innocuous and strange quite like Sayaka Murata. This story collection is typically striking, using larger-than-life situations to explore basic questions of what we value and how we relate to each other. Perhaps most of all, Murata puts her readers in the position of her characters, so we see them differently as a result.
4. Mothers Don’t (2019) by Katixa Agirre Translated from Basque by Kristin Addis (2022)
Few books that I read this year made such an immediate impression as this one. Agirre’s narrator tries to understand why another woman killed her children, while trying to come to terms with her own feelings about motherhood. Contradictions abound and nothing is reconciled, and this is what drives the novel – not to mention its vivid prose.
Russell Hoban was my discovery of the year, someone I know I’ll read again. Turtle Diary is the story of two lonely characters linked only by a wish to set free the sea turtles at London Zoo. I really appreciated the ambivalence of Hoban’s novel, the way that saving the turtles in itself isn’t enough to fill the hole in the characters’ lives. I simply haven’t read anything quite like this book before.
I loved this novel exploring the ramifications of new technology. Morgan imagines the development of a matter transporter and, step by step, puts humanity’s relationship with it under scrutiny. What is perhaps most chilling is the way that everything just trundles on, away from the people actually experiencing this technology. Appliance provides a welcome space for reflection.
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1. Cursed Bunny (2021) by Bora Chung Translated from Korean by Anton Hur (2021)
At the top of the tree this year is a story collection that grabbed my attention from the first page and never let go. Some of the stories are strange and creepy, others more like fairy tales. Many are built around powerful metaphors that deepen the intensity of the fiction. It’s all held together by Chung’s distinctive voice, in that wonderful translation by Anton Hur. I look forward to reading more of Chung’s work in the future.
With that, I will leave you until 2023. In the meantime, you can also find me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon – and I’ll see you back here next year.
Oh, how I loved this. It’s not often that a story collection will grab my attention from the beginning and keep it throughout. But, for me, there isn’t a weak link among the ten stories in Cursed Bunny.
Bora Chung’s stories in this book are often strange, often creepy, always compelling. The title story concerns a family who make cursed objects. The grandfather tells his grandson how he broke the rules and cursed an object for personal use: a bunny-shaped lamp designed to wreak revenge on the company that destroyed his friend’s family business. Rabbits chew their way through the company’s paperwork, but they don’t stop there – and the tale takes some unexpected and horrific turns.
Some of Chung’s stories are built around powerful metaphors. In ‘The Embodiment’, a woman finds that her period won’t stop. She takes birth control pills for several months, to no avail – in fact, they make her pregnant. The doctors tell her that she must find someone to be the child’s father, or things will go badly for her. Societal pressures around motherhood and relationships are transformed into vivid narrative strokes that raise the protagonist’s predicament to a higher pitch of intensity.
There are entries in Cursed Bunny that read like fairy tales, though with Chung’s distinctive stamp. ‘Snare’ begins with a man coming across a trapped fox that bleeds liquid gold. He becomes rich from this, but eventually bleeds the fox to death. The man has the fox’s fur made into a scarf for his wife, who then falls pregnant. The man finds a way to obtain gold from his children, but at a terrible cost. This is a sharp parable of greed.
What really makes Cursed Bunny hang together for me is the voice. Anton Hur’s translation from Korean is beguiling, as it persuades the reader that all of this could happen. Bora Chung goes on to my list of must-read authors.
Published by Honford Star, a small press specialising in books from East Asia.
Read my other posts on the 2022 International Booker Prize here.
August is Women in Translation Month (hostel by Meytal from Biblibio), so here are three (well, two-and-a-half) relevant reviews first posted on my Instagram.
Natalia Ginzburg, Happiness, as Such (1973) Translated from the Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor (2019)
This is the second novel that I’ve read by Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91), following Voices in the Evening.
Happiness, as Such was originally published in Italian in 1973 with the title Caro Michele (“Dear Michele”). As that might suggest, it’s told mainly in the form of letters. In 1970, Adriana writes to her son Michele. She doesn’t have high expectations (“I doubt you’ll come over for my birthday because I don’t think you’ll have remembered it”), but needs to tell him that his father is dying. A woman has also turned up with a baby that might be Michele’s. What Adriana doesn’t know is that Michele has moved to England, and isn’t planning to come back.
Adriana’s letters to Michele are particularly barbed, but as the correspondence we read extends more widely through Michele’s family and friends, there is a growing sense of characters talking past each other. We never get to see Michele’s life directly, and it’s as though the other characters can make of it whatever suits them.
The English title of this translation is referenced a couple of times, such as when Adriana wishes her son happiness, “if there is such a thing as happiness.” Looking at the book as a whole, this is an open question, and it keeps the novel on edge throughout.
Gøhril Gabrielsen, Ankomst (2017) Translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin (2020)
Ankomst is the second title in Peirene Press‘s Closed Universe series, following the marvellous Snow, Dog, Foot. In this book, we meet another individual slowly unravelling on their own, somewhere cold.
Our narrator is an environmental scientist who’s spending the winter in a cabin in northern Norway, studying seabirds. She’d like it if everything could be about reliable, measurable facts, but she can’t shake off the emotionally complicated situation she has left behind.
The narrator has left her young daughter Lina in the care of her ex, Lina’s father, whom she refers to only as S and detests. She’s in regular Skype contact with her current partner, Jo; he’s supposed to be coming to visit but his trip keeps being delayed.
Our protagonist becomes fascinated with the story of a couple of settlers who lived on this peninsula in the 19th century and whose house burnt down. She has visions of how she imagines their lives to have been, but there’s a sense that she is actually rehearsing her anxieties about her own life. Then there are the missing days, the cries she thinks she hears…
The title Ankomst means ‘arrival’, and there’s a growing tension as different arrivals are delayed and unexpectedly brought forward. Ankomst is an immersive, disorienting character study, and it ends in just the right place.
Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day (2013) Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith (2020)
Bae Suah has been on my list of authors to try for some time. This short novel of hers is short and strange and… difficult to capture in words. (which is why I haven’t written more about it!).
We begin with Ayami, the sole employee of an audio theatre that plays back recorded performances for visually impaired people. Strange things are happening: she keeps hearing spoken lines from the radio that turns itself on and off. She sees an old couple outside the theatre who she thinks may be her parents. Today is also the last day the theatre will be open, so Ayami needs a new job.
What follows is day merging into night, reality fraying at the edges, in sweltering summer heat. A summary wouldn’t do it justice, but it is a suffocating and disorienting book to read.
Here we are, then: my top 5 reading memories from the last decade. I knew how this countdown would end before I started compiling the list. The reading experiences I’m talking about here… more than anything, this is why I read.
Newly longlisted for the Women’s Prize, Lillian Li’s debut novel centres on the Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland. The restaurant is owned by brothers Johnny and Jimmy Han, who inherited it from their father. Jimmy wants to set up his own place, but he’s gone to Uncle Pang, a dubious family friend, for help – and that’s unlikely to end well. Alongside this strand, Li’s novel explores the relationship between two long-serving members of staff, and the lives of the younger generation. The end result is a composite portrait of a family (and the wider community of the restaurant) at a point of pressure and change, where the future is far from certain.
Alan Parks, February’s Son (2019)
February’s Son is the second of Alan Parks’s crime novels set in 1970s Glasgow, following on from Bloody January. We pick up the action in February 1973, when detective Harry McCoy is tasked with solving the murder of a young footballer who had the words ‘BYE BYE’ carved into his chest. The trail leads McCoy into the world of local gangs, and puts him back in touch with his childhood friend-turned-gangster Stevie Cooper. This is another intriguing mystery from Parks; the ongoing development of McCoy’s character is also interesting, as he sails (or finds himself pushed) ever closer to the wind.
Hwang Jungeun, I’ll Go On (2014) Translated from the Korean by Emily Yae Won
I’ll Go On is a novel in three parts, each narrated by a different character: Sora, her sister Nana, and their childhood friend Naghi. Nana is pregnant, which is tough news for Sora to take, because it puts her in mind of the difficult relationship she and Nana had with their own mother. Hwang’s novel chronicles a process of coming to terms with (or trying to break away from) past and present. I particularly like the different voices captured in Yae Won’s translation, as they cast each narrator in a different light from section to section.
Trevor Mark Thomas, The Bothy (2019)
This debut novel begins with Tom fleeing to a remote, run-down pub called the Bothy. His girlfriend’s family blame Tom for her death, and now there is a price on his head. He is taken in by Frank, the gangster in charge of the Bothy, but even this may not be enough to protect him. By keeping the focus tightly on Tom’s present predicament, rather than the background that led up to it, Thomas gives his novel a sense of urgency and drive which pushes the reader on. The Bothy is a hothouse of character that remains tense to the end.
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