Whale: SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023

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Daisy fleabane in particular had always crowded the perimeter of the brickyard like soldiers surrounding a fortress, and once the humans were gone the plant had instantly infiltrated the site, occupying the entire place. She looked over the other side of the tracks at Pyeongdae, far away, below the foot of the mountain. The story often contains a twinge of wistful sadness and nostalgia that is far more common in Latin Boom literature but feels equally at home when mixed with the deeply Korean concept of han, a feeling of deep sorrow that is often claimed to be an integral part of Korean identity.

Cheon Myeong-kwan : Whale | KCCUK Cheon Myeong-kwan : Whale | KCCUK

Told in an omniscient and playful narrative voice, smoothly translated by Chi-Young Kim, this is a distinctly Korean take on Great Expectations, a tale of aspiration and folly punctuated with artisanal bricks and dried fish . Boulder reluctantly agrees, and the book turns to the struggles of imminent parenthood, both emotional (“if only you could set fire to every word that evokes an illness”) and existential: for Boulder, “motherhood is […] the mark that impedes freedom”. Her daughter Chunhui, who can only communicate with elephants, faces loneliness and works in a brickmaking factory. Chi-Young is a skilled translator who’s had a long career, so I was very happy that she was translating my novel. Replete with unexpected surprises and a wicked sense of humor,Whaleis a riveting, rollicking, combination of adventure and satire of epic saga proportions by arguably one of the most original literary talents in international literature.Whale is a captivating and moving novel that explores Korean history, mother-daughter bonds, and the human spirit. On the contrary, if the novel has a fault it’s that too much happens too quickly, but it’s highly entertaining. The Gospel According to the New World starts with the birth of a boy in an “overseas department”, “surrounded by water on all sides”. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles.

Whale: SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023

The narrative is so unembellished and laced with scathing humour that it has a jarring effect, further facilitated by uneven segments and breaks – much like our thoughts, some fleeting, some resilient. The central figure is Gaustine, a sort of time traveller who opens a clinic devoted to periods of the past, to help people with Alzheimer’s. Whale is an astounding epic: part multigenerational epic, part mother-daughter saga, imbued with magical realism and a satirical lens on the post-Korean War years.Equally, they could be from anywhere, small villages across the planet dreaming of crossing into the promised land of whale-sized aspirations. She heard the prison guard who tormented her, whispering, Berkshire, a region in England famous for its pigs.

The 2023 International Booker prize shortlist – review

However, it didn't subtract from the fact that Myeong-Kwan's work is deeply absorbing and sucked me in; I found myself picking this book up at any given opportunity and managed to finish it in a speedy two days. Kwan unleashes a tide of feral characters, many of them women with an almost primal hunger for survival that are plucked from the landscape of his imagination that ranges from a small village in a remote mountain valley to a fishing village in South Korea. Rather than focus explicitly on these episodes – the Korean War, US occupation and military dictatorships, for instance – Whale tells its grand national narrative on a smaller human scale. The brickyard consisted of only a few kilns, now ruined, built along a straight line, and a house woven together with wooden planks and shards of slate. The story starts in a small village, where Geumbok grows up in poverty but manages to succeed through her wit and determination.Translating literature is critical work and if translators hadn’t undertaken that labour, I would have been someone who’d never had the opportunity to read Hemingway or Conan Doyle. Brimming with surprises and wicked humor, Whale is an adventure-satire of epic proportions by one of the most original voices in South Korea. It is also symbol embodied in the physicality of Chunhui herself and in the shape of the cinema Geumbok wishes to build. It engages with questions of belief, philosophy and politics, and brings together a range of captivating characters from across the New World as Pascal grapples with his reputation as a new Messiah. Cheon’s novel has been compared to Gabriel Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; both are larger-than-life magic-realist tales.