When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface, forcing her to re-live the most intense period of her life. With profound intellectual and emotional insight, she revisits the death of her beloved mother, the strong bond with her now-dying former college professor, the excitement of her first love, and the friendships forged out of a shared sense of isolation and grief.

When I was small, my friend who had lived in England for three years told me that if you answer the door with a towel wrapped around your hair, it was a signal to the person at the door that you’ve just had sex. It’s one of those things that stuck with me long after it should have been obvious that it wasn’t true. (Like, right? That’s not true, right, British people?) It’s clung stubbornly to my neurons for over fifteen years, I think because of the totally true truth that you can misunderstand what is going on, completely, when you are in a culture that doesn’t belong to you. When my mother moved from New York to Louisiana, and people she’d just met would ask her to dinner, she said that she used to think, What do you want from me?

(They wanted to feed her dinner.)

I’ll Be Right There gave me a lot of trouble in this regard: I didn’t know what was implied by the words and actions of the characters. I didn’t have enough of a grip on the cultural assumptions of South Korea to feel sure all the time about what was going on. What do these people’s choices mean? To take a small example, a girl called Miru writes down everything she eats in a small notebook. Since none of the other characters observes this and says “Oh dear, has she got an eating disorder?”, I mistrusted my instinct that this was indicative of an eating disorder, and I was surprised and annoyed with myself when it turned out later that yes, she had an eating disorder.

This is nothing to do with the author and everything to do with me. I don’t like the feeling of not being certain about what’s behind the words everyone is saying. I like to understand the subtext, and it’s much much harder with a translated novel, especially one that comes from so far away with — presumably — so many cultural assumptions that won’t be the same as mine. I never felt sure how I was supposed to feel about anything: Yoon’s relationship with her childhood friend as he goes off to the army; Miru’s desperate longing to share a house with her two best friends; the steady growing apart of college friendships. And I think that uncertainty on my part detracted from my ability to appreciate the book on its merits.

But what I did love was the elegiac tone of the book as a whole. There are so many deaths that Yoon misses, not for any dramatic reason but simply by not being there, not doing the work to stay in touch and hold on to people. She remembers a time when she and her ex-boyfriend stopped saying “I’ll be right there” in their phone conversations with each other, and she wishes that she had kept doing that, kept making herself available in difficult times as well as good ones. The wish to have done more and been more after people are gone is universal, I think, and Shin Kyung-Sook carries it across beautifully.
Do y’all encounter this problem with translated novels? Do you get bogged down in uncertainty over what you’re supposed to think of the characters and their actions?

The post Review: I’ll Be Right There, Shin Kyung-Sook (translated by Sora Kim-Russell) appeared first on Reading the End.

I have struggled long and hard to write a post about the first book I read for Women in Translation Month, and there just isn’t any version of the post I can write that will spare you from major important spoilers. Because here is the thing: The first book I read for Women in Translation Month bears certain very strong similarities to this one American book that you have all heard of, and so I can’t talk about either one of them without spoiling them for people who haven’t read both.

The first book I read for Women in Translation Month is about some people who find themselves in a new situation that’s not totally comfortable to them, and it brings out some traits in them that were already present but maybe not quite so noticeable. It’s also about this other person who’s not totally comfortable with the new people who are around him/her, and the new people bring out some traits in him/her that were also already present but maybe not quite so noticeable at first. I’d like to say a little bit here about point of view, but I think it would make the comparison to that one American book you’ve all heard of too obvious.

When I read that one American book you’ve all heard of, I knew what was going on because I had heard about it from the internet. When I read the first book I read for Women in Translation Month, I didn’t know what was going on at first because it’s way less famous than that one American book you’ve all heard of. But then I read the end, so it was okay. Just like in that one American book you’ve all heard of, the ending of the first book I read for Women in Translation Month turns out okay for some people and less okay for other people. You have to draw your own conclusions about what happens to some of the characters, but that is okay by me.

If you liked that one American book you’ve all heard of, you might like this one too, or you might feel like one of the two books was the lame version of the other one. In any case, I can’t really recommend this book based on your liking for the American book, because if I did that you’d know all the spoilers for this one, and if you’re a spoiler-disliker, that might ruin your enjoyment of it and cancel out how much you might have liked it on the basis of its similarity to that one American book you’ve all heard of. But if you do happen across the first book I read for Women in Translation Month, just know that I enjoyed reading it (though probably not as much as that one American book you’ve all heard of, because I really do struggle with reading books in translation), and I’d say go ahead and try it! if I could do that without spoiling everything for you.

I’ve said too much. I’d better stop.

Edit to add: I swear I just meant this post as a joke, but everyone says it comes off like a riddle. Not intended to be one! If it had been a riddle I would have given some legitimate clues. So now I’m going to tell you what the two books are. But just know that if you read one of them, it will spoil you for the other one. You can highlight the following text to learn which books they are. The German book is Juli Zeh’s newest, Decompression, and the American book you’ve all heard of is Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Sorry! I didn’t mean to be mysterious, just funny.

The post A read for Women in Translation Month that I can’t tell you about appeared first on Reading the End.