한국인
In a series of short pieces in this "book that is not a novel" (Dear Manchester Chinatown), Kim records her frustration with the British academic system: she doesn't get called 'professor' as she would if she was working in the USA, and she has to produce 'research' (in her case write at least 8,000 words of a novel in two years) in order to pass her probation and be made permanent. Inter alia, she records instances in which she feels threatened or undervalued by men because she is a woman and occasions which she perceives as racist because she is Korean.
Scattered throughout the book are Korean (I presume) characters, sometimes forming blocks of text. As regular readers of my blog will know, this is one of my pet hates. Usually it is authors who use French or Latin either on the assumption that I can read these languages (or can be bothered to use Google Translate) or simply to show off their knowledge. I suspect that, in this book, Kim is using these characters deliberately so that I cannot understand what she is saying.
While I defend the right of an artist to create work purely because that fulfils some creative need within themselves (just as I would defend a religious person to worship before a congregation of themselves only, because worship is about the relationship between the worshipper and the god), they aren't entitled to demand my support. One of the functions of art is to communicate and art that fails to communicate is not as good as art that succeeds. So, for example, when a poet gives a long explanation of what their poem 'means' before reciting it: a better poem wouldn't need the explanation. So, for example, when a piece of work on a gallery wall is accompanied by text telling you what it's all about: a better artwork wouldn't need the text.
Kim's use of Korean characters seems to be more about making a political point than attempting to communicate with this reader. I persisted reading this book to the end but I neither enjoyed it nor felt anything but alienated.
Selected quotes:
- "A public history seeps into the body, the way tea leaves soak upo the scent of a fridge." (Forgive me my eyeballs)
- "They drove for some time, their headlights cutting white through the strangely tinctured dimness of the tunnel." (Forgive me my eyeballs)
- "In creating his own oeuvre under the declaration of a new language, Komunyakaa provokes participation in the living dialogue of his poetry" (Dear Manchester Chinatown) In creating her hybrid language, Kim failed to provoke my participation in the monologue of her prose.
- "Nearly all of us still recognize the sun as a prickly circle, or a tree as a cloud hanging about two sticks." (Dear Manchester Chinatown)
- "Sprawled there on the hood was a forest of little handprints in bright orange dust, as if the hands of countless children had been pressed there, sticky with thick pollen dust." (Dear Manchester Chinatown) This is the culmination of a superbly tense little horror story.
This book was longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
May 2025; 172 pages
First published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2025
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