Violets

I chose to read this at least partly because Anton Hur was the translator and he seems like a great translator (twice longlisted for this year’s Booker International). This was a really good book and I will be exploring more of Kyung-Sook Shin’s English backlist (though I believe this was actually published earlier in Korean).The first two words that come to mind when I think of this book are quiet and melancholy. Within the first couple of chapters, I worried that this would be too slow for me and that I wouldn’t be engaged enough to want to pick it back up. But once the narrator, San, met her coworker Su-ae, the story really picked up for me and I finished most of it in one day.This story is really one of loneliness. San has not been loved in the way she has deserved, both by her mother and by friends. She experienced childhood rejection and this has shaped her interactions as a young adult. She hesitates to be vulnerable and really let anyone into her life.There is content that is difficult in this and the quiet nature of the story will not be something for everyone, but I think it is definitely worth picking up if that appeals to you.

Violets is about loneliness, but not in the ways I’d imagined heading into it. The loneliness here isn’t so much a sudden downpour, but a summer rain that’s transformed into a thunderstorm since you last looked out the window. As I watched Kyung-Sook Shin’s Oh San meander through days of working in a flower shop, her cloudy thoughts and monotonous actions somehow sharpen in emotional intensity—an image of a woman caught up in an obsessive desire that dulls the senses and numbs the heart of our protagonist as its venom creeps up her roots. While this might not be a great match for a reader interested in a dynamic plot, if you're interested in a sojourn through the lush landscape of one woman's life, this is a fantastic choice.

We meet a lost, emotionally fragile young woman, who lives for a singular love she experienced long ago on an empty summer afternoon, who becomes possessed by an all consuming obsession with a man she barely knows. Hauntingly spare. The prose is at once lyric and restrained, almost utilitarian, and everywhere are plants: leaves, stems, bark and blossoms, changing with the seasons. Well worth reading.

Violets is a timeless, and up to the moment story of a young girl spurned in love when her good friend loves her and then discards her so brutally. This event , once beautiful and life affirming, turns into a haunting that the protagonist cannot escape from her entire life. She floats through life searching for acceptance, love, a reason to exist even but at each turn, she finds the brutality of men and the harshness of a society that means to crush her. In only the way Shin writes, poetic, lyrical and powerfully right on the mark, this author explores what we women experience and this book written when Shin was only twenty, it's her 2nd novel, resonates as if written today. For those who liked The Vegetarian , Violets was published 8 years before yet seems way ahead... unforgettable. I loved it.

Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded down...then back up...then back down again....This translation from the Korean joins a widening stream of Korean-culture transplants...<I>Squid Game, Minari</i>, this author's previously translated novel <I>Please Look After Mom</i>...making their roots into American pop-cultural soil.If you've yet to explore the trickle, start now before it's a flood. I think it's wonderful because English-language monoglot culture gets stale and boring and all alike if we don't seek out fresh infusions of talent and stories. And, like all the best translations, this story's timelessness is rendered in prose that could very easily have been first created in English...none of the occasional signals of awkwardly trying to explicate something that one word in the translated language would convey whole and entire. That is a fine achievement indeed, probably helped along by the fact that things like "minari" aren't quite as furrin as they would've been in 2011, when <I>Please Look After Mom</i> was published.What happens in this story is not particularly new or unusual. A girl is born to unfit parents:<blockquote>In a house with shut doors, a mother closes her eyes as the baby’s grandmother offers her the newborn. The mother knows what will happen now. An uncelebrated girl. The infant accepts her mother’s closed eyes in lieu of a loving caress, perhaps having intuited her fate from the womb, and does not bother crying. The sound of the monsoon fills the house. Underneath the porch, a dog curls its legs into itself. Can the baby hear the sound of the rain? She’s about to fall asleep in her grandmother’s hands. That same night, her father gives his daughter’s face only a cursory glance.</blockquote>Thus does another unwanted girl enter the world that won't ever bother to see her, really even to look at her. She's just...there. Her father never bothers to return; her mother never bothers with her at all, constantly seeking a man to care for her. (To be fair, an ordinary Korean woman's opportunities a generation ago weren't plentiful, and San's mother wasn't exceptional.)<blockquote>Her mother. San thinks about her from time to time.If she had begged her to stay, in front of that carefully prepared food, would she have listened? Why had San never once tried to hold her back? Wherever it was that her mother went, she never forgot to send her daughter money for school until San graduated.The last time San had seen her mother was when she was a freshman in high school.</blockquote>Children of addicts, the world over, tell versions of this same story. In this case, San's mother is addicted to men. She can't live without a man taking care of her, and she sacrifices the daughter she didn't want to get what she does want.Author Shin isn't solely criticizing the mother. She is critiquing the social organization, the patriarchy, that privileges men and their desires over women and their needs so completely, so thoroughly, that the women are hollow and meaningless without a man. It is repulsive and it is reprehensible, and much abuse and violence simply are borne by the women because what option do they have? What other choice can they make? In San's case, she is so hollowed out by the complete absence of love from her mother (or anyone else) that she enacts the form of love she knows: rejection follows violence, as it must.There is nothing forgiving in San. She forgives nothing, she is forgiven nothing, throughout the book. She is alone, she feels lonely of it (or so we infer...I don't know that she would be able to articulate the unmoored, disconnected reality that lonely people all share). For this, among other, reasons, this is a hard story to read. If you have ever been truly, down-to-the-bone lonely, this might be a triggering read for you. I haven't run across too many reads with this hyperconcentrated focus on loneliness, or too many with more success in rendering an emotional state into prose.<blockquote>A stranger to every single person in the crowd, San finds herself blocking the sidewalk as people swerve to avoid her. Even if a carnival were to break out around her, the vacant expression on her face looks entrenched enough to persist.</blockquote>Because she knows nothing of love, loving, being loved, San sees nothing except the one moment when everything changed, when the one love she thought she had was denied and made nothing. Not even attempting to find her former home nets San anything, she sees not the fields of minari she grew up among, where her life irrevocably emptied out and flowed away from her, but careful rectilinear plots of...something not minari. She has no roots. She feels no kinship.<blockquote>Nothing happened this past summer. Only that, in the hot sun from time to time, a brief thought would appear and disappear around me. That thought was closer to me than any of the flowers in the shop. Even as I tried to capture the thought on paper, the heat would exhaust me and I'd give up. There were plenty of things I gave up, using the heat as an excuse. Which means I spent this past summer repeatedly deciding to do things and then giving up on them. As if my life were an exhibition of how good I am at giving up. It was that kind of summer.</blockquote>It was that kind of life. It won't end well, it didn't begin well or go on well; that much we know. There's nothing hopeful in this story. Women like San aren't ever anyone's focus...her job in the flower shop working with and for Su-ae notwithstanding. She receives the desperate, genuine love of Su-ae as...nothing. San is fixated on emptiness...her only friend abandoned her!...and on men she does not want. She needs their love. She doesn't want it. She decided long ago that love wasn't something she could have, feel, receive, give. And so when it's offered to her she...doesn't see it. She does see the want of one man, she feels the desperate pull of another man on her attention, and gets nothing but unwanted results.<blockquote>Every attempt to resist is met with his greater strength. In a moment, her head begins to droop.She's released onto the street.Her mind is completely taken over, her body a husk. No one seems to take note of the loneliness she carries. Just some woman in the crowd, unaware that her top is undone. A more observant person might have noticed her cheek slightly swollen from having been punched, the thin lines of her face a touch asymmetrical because of it. Someone might see her pale face and think, How could anyone ever look so pale....</blockquote>A life of being unwanted, invisible, and it comes down to a final indignity. San is raped. Her hollowness filled at last with the violence that is all she can accept. It isn't in her to accept the reality of her situation, being unloved and unwanted, then seek out change. That's simply impossible. She leaves safety, courts rejection, and seeks oblivion.Leaving behind only the tiniest of wakes...the end of the story of Oh San is a poignant piece of mythologizing that fit so poorly onto the rest of the story that I was forced by honest anger and sincere disdain for its sentimentality to whack a star off my rating. After a night's sleep where I dreamed of the photographer and San:<blockquote>Violets. They bloom everywhere, making them seem more like weeds than proper flowers. San takes a closer look at them. Their little green leaves are small, their purple blossoms tiny. Before she came to the flower shop, she knew them as swallow flowers. Memories of entangling two swallow flower stems together and pulling them apart— one side was bound to snap. Whoever’s stem didn’t was the winner. She forgot what the prizes were, but she’d played the game many times. They did it with broadleaf plantains; they did it with foxtails.The man keeps pressing the shutter and mumbling something discontentedly. “What’s so pretty about these flowers? Such nonsense.” His disappointment is so palpable, it makes her apologetic.</blockquote>...I realized that his arc needed an end, too. I might not like that end, but I would've felt cheated (if not right away, then after my irritation with the whole ending subsided) had it not been there. So back came a half-star, though I confess with some grumbling on my part.I think this small, powerful story deserves your eyeblinks. I think we should all resolve to notice the Oh Sans of this world, to extend a welcome to the table of them, to recognize their living presence instead of making them ghosts before they die.

Not long finished “The Vegetarian” which also charts the mental disintegration of a young Korean woman and although I much enjoyed it, I found this book even more engaging.