Mar. 5th, 2018 02:16 pm
Second-rate
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muckefuckI'm complaining about this book everywhere else I post about my reading, so why not here, too?
Just before Valentine's Day at a quasi-staff event, someone recommended Min Jin Lee's Pachinko to me. It was an easy sell; in college, I took courses in Korean and East Asian Civilisations, so family novel set in the Korean community in Japan seemed totally up my alley. In hindsight, that background may have worked to my detriment.
The reason is that I can't see much appeal to this work beyond the novelty of setting. The plot is a pretty standard immigrants-overcome-marginalisation narrative that is almost anodyne in its evenhandedness. Everyone's motives are in plain view so can see just how pure most of them are and whenever someone does something nasty, one of the POV characters is sure to muse about how this alone doesn't make them a bad person. As a result, none of them ends up leaving much of an impression.
There's not much to be said for the prose either, except that if she was trying to mimic the artless semi-didactic style of much popular 20th-century Korean literature, she nailed it. It surprised me to read in her interview at the end of the book (because of course there's an interview at the end of the book) that she's an admirer of great 19th-century novelists because it sure doesn't show.
So what does that leave you with? A competent melodrama stuffed with details of Korean and Japanese folkways during the 20th century. Despite the title, pachinko is hardly touched on the book, let alone the teeming underworld surrounding it. (The pachinko parlour owners we meet are candidates for sainthood.) She did make one of her main characters yakuza, but his crimes are barely more than alluded to.
For someone who hasn't already read dozens of novels by native Japanese and Korean authors--not to mention scores of nonfiction works on the history and sociology of East Asia--I guess these details are intriguing. They'd probably find the gratuitous sprinkling of (occasionally wrong) Japanese more fascinating than annoying and perhaps didn't notice as much the degree to which Lee focuses on well-off characters with middle-class values and lifestyles to the exclusion of most others.
I'm not sure what they'll make of some lubricious scenes that don't seem to further the plot or go anywhere interesting on their own, not to mention the gay character whose sexuality seems either a clumsy attempt at inclusiveness or an excuse for some heavy-handed parallelism. (¿Por que no los dos?) Maybe if the group an ex-coworker is trying to assemble to discuss the novel comes together, I'll have a chance to ask.
It's not a terrible book, so I did finish it. By a third of the way in, I was invested enough in the characters to sort of care what happened to them and I'll admit to shedding a few tears at a closing scene where a widow addresses her dead husband. And it got me interested in reading more. For instance, I'm curious to reread Hwang Sun-wŏn's 일월 (translated as Sunlight, moonlight) which covers a similar topic (i.e. paekchŏng in Korea) to see if it really represents a superior treatment of the subject or that's just rosy retrospection.
In fact, part of the reason I'm writing about it here is that I suspect if I don't, I'll have trouble remember what exactly it was I didn't like about it. (I had that trouble when The city and the city came up recently and fortunately I'd scribbled enough notes elsewhere to jog my fogbank of a brain.) I doubt I'll have the same trouble recalling Böll's Gruppenbild mit Dame or Dowlatabadi's The colonel, to name the books I read right before it and right after it.
Just before Valentine's Day at a quasi-staff event, someone recommended Min Jin Lee's Pachinko to me. It was an easy sell; in college, I took courses in Korean and East Asian Civilisations, so family novel set in the Korean community in Japan seemed totally up my alley. In hindsight, that background may have worked to my detriment.
The reason is that I can't see much appeal to this work beyond the novelty of setting. The plot is a pretty standard immigrants-overcome-marginalisation narrative that is almost anodyne in its evenhandedness. Everyone's motives are in plain view so can see just how pure most of them are and whenever someone does something nasty, one of the POV characters is sure to muse about how this alone doesn't make them a bad person. As a result, none of them ends up leaving much of an impression.
There's not much to be said for the prose either, except that if she was trying to mimic the artless semi-didactic style of much popular 20th-century Korean literature, she nailed it. It surprised me to read in her interview at the end of the book (because of course there's an interview at the end of the book) that she's an admirer of great 19th-century novelists because it sure doesn't show.
So what does that leave you with? A competent melodrama stuffed with details of Korean and Japanese folkways during the 20th century. Despite the title, pachinko is hardly touched on the book, let alone the teeming underworld surrounding it. (The pachinko parlour owners we meet are candidates for sainthood.) She did make one of her main characters yakuza, but his crimes are barely more than alluded to.
For someone who hasn't already read dozens of novels by native Japanese and Korean authors--not to mention scores of nonfiction works on the history and sociology of East Asia--I guess these details are intriguing. They'd probably find the gratuitous sprinkling of (occasionally wrong) Japanese more fascinating than annoying and perhaps didn't notice as much the degree to which Lee focuses on well-off characters with middle-class values and lifestyles to the exclusion of most others.
I'm not sure what they'll make of some lubricious scenes that don't seem to further the plot or go anywhere interesting on their own, not to mention the gay character whose sexuality seems either a clumsy attempt at inclusiveness or an excuse for some heavy-handed parallelism. (¿Por que no los dos?) Maybe if the group an ex-coworker is trying to assemble to discuss the novel comes together, I'll have a chance to ask.
It's not a terrible book, so I did finish it. By a third of the way in, I was invested enough in the characters to sort of care what happened to them and I'll admit to shedding a few tears at a closing scene where a widow addresses her dead husband. And it got me interested in reading more. For instance, I'm curious to reread Hwang Sun-wŏn's 일월 (translated as Sunlight, moonlight) which covers a similar topic (i.e. paekchŏng in Korea) to see if it really represents a superior treatment of the subject or that's just rosy retrospection.
In fact, part of the reason I'm writing about it here is that I suspect if I don't, I'll have trouble remember what exactly it was I didn't like about it. (I had that trouble when The city and the city came up recently and fortunately I'd scribbled enough notes elsewhere to jog my fogbank of a brain.) I doubt I'll have the same trouble recalling Böll's Gruppenbild mit Dame or Dowlatabadi's The colonel, to name the books I read right before it and right after it.
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