I can’t say the story is a pleasure to read but rather, a gut-shifting catharsis, a harkening back to the times I’ve fallen apart in my early- to mid-twenties.
Though I’m being glib, there’s nothing funny about being a woman unraveling. Shin writes: “An endless space appears before her, like she’s slipping into an abyss.” In some respects, San is a prototypical woman protagonist of Jess Bergman’s denuded realism -one of my favorite premises, honestly.
It’s all very gay.Ĭan one ever run away from such grief? San’s interiority reads as blank-perhaps depressed- and her outward presence distracted. In these two books, once the protagonists become adults, they yearn. The world around her glimmers in an eerily violent way: “Where has this sunlight been hiding? A shard of it falls across her scratched skin and quivers there in pieces.” San seems to stumble passively into a job flower shop and then into sharing her apartment with her new coworker Su-ae, whose vitality and influence reveal further echoes of Namae. The loss of both her mother and childhood friend reveals its after aftershocks to the readers with gentle inevitability. The narrative skips ahead to San as a young woman newly arrived to a big city and wanting work. Originally published in 2001, Violets introduces its protagonist San as a child being rejected by her best friend Namae.
