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FictionViolets
by Kyung Sook Shin
A NEGLECTED YOUNG WOMAN experiences the violence and isolation of contemporary Korean society. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian meets Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. The book is a close observation of what would otherwise be “a story soon to forget” of a young woman everyone forgot, including her own parents. There are countless moments of casual and not-so-casual moments of violence: a pregnant stray cat rejected by everyone, including the flower shop’s owner who tries throwing it away but relents when the cat crawls back; the landlord’s daughter yearning for a piano, and once obtained, her father destroying it in a fit of rage, prompting his daughter to finally call the police on him; the repeated image of the lush, green dropwort field, the site of San’s happiest memory, but also the beginning of her saddest. These are interspersed with many closely observed details such as a descriptive passage on Venus-fly-traps, a scene with a caged dog, and a plethora of place-names in northern Seoul where the author still lives to this day. The prose is unhurried, concise, and above all, intimate. The original title is taken from the flower violets as well as the aural similarity to the English word “violence”; in other words, the title is English to begin with. Violets was published six years before The Vegetarian. “Kyung-Sook Shin’s novel bears none of the anxiousness or cunning of a narrator eager to grab hold of a reader. She takes her time, pays attention to things that seem insignificant but beautiful, and eventually binds a spell around the reader until the very end. What seems like a series of random thoughts always ends up as a setup to a greater effect down the line, and one marvels at her sense of structure and design. I liken the charm of Shin’s writing to the consolations of a lush plant.” —Park Wanseo, bestselling novelist
