WHALE, the precarious lot of Korea's powerless through a family's life

WHALE
CHEON MYEONG-KWAN (tr. Chi-Young Kim)
Archipelago Books
$22.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

Shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association's 2024 National Translation Awards!

The Publisher Says: SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

A sweeping, multi-generational tale blending fable, farce, and fantasy—a masterpiece of modern fiction perfect for fans of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Whale is the English-language debut of a beloved and bestselling South Korean author, a born storyteller with a cinematic, darkly humorous, and thoroughly original perspective.

A woman sells her daughter to a passing beekeeper for two jars of honey. A baby weighing fifteen pounds is born in the depths of winter but named “Girl of Spring.” A storm brings down the roof of a ramshackle restaurant to reveal a hidden fortune. These are just a few of the events that set Myeong-kwan Cheon’s beautifully crafted, wild world in motion.

Whale, set in a remote village in South Korea, follows the lives of three linked characters: Geumbok, an extremely ambitious woman who has been chasing an indescribable thrill ever since she first saw a whale crest in the ocean; her mute daughter, Chunhui, who communicates with elephants; and a one-eyed woman who controls honeybees with a whistle. Brimming with surprises and wicked humor, Whale is an adventure-satire of epic proportions by one of the most original voices in South Korea.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

While the man with the scar—the renowned con artist, notorious smuggler, superb butcher, rake, pimp of all the prostitutes on the wharf, and hot-tempered broker—was a taciturn man, he was gregarious with Geumbok, telling her everything about himself. The stories he told her were frightening and cruel, about murder and kidnapping, conspiracy and betrayal—how he was born to an old prostitute who worked along the wharf and was raised by other prostitutes when she died during childbirth, how he grew up without knowing his father, how a smuggler who claimed to be his father appeared in his life, how he stowed away to Japan with this man, how a typhoon came upon them during the journey, how the ship capsized, how the smuggler didn’t know how to swim and flailed in the waves before sinking into the water, how he, who thankfully knew how to swim, drifted onto a beach and lost consciousness, where he was discovered by the yakuza, how he lived with them and learned to use a knife, how he killed for the first time, how he met the geisha who was his first love, how he parted ways with her, how he returned home and consolidated power in this city—but she remained enthralled, as though she were watching a movie.

It really amazed me how very violent this read was. Women, queer people, and children are assaulted in every way you can conceive of on practically every page. This is not to say the women are never the abusers...one woman grooms and sexually assaults a young boy.

Korea, once a backwater place only marginally present in the world's mind, was never expected to be more than the setting of a future war between the US and China. The huge existential dread of living in a place known only as the scene of a war that hasn't happened yet and only a few years away from being the colony of a brutal imperial power that was determined to extirpate its history and culture made all the modern cultural and economic flowering of Korea inconceivable. That has given the worst, most predatory actors free rein to design the socioeconomic climate to empower the lowest, most venal people to excel. (Does this sound familiar, Westerners?) The present-day creators working in Korea are shouting their "NO MORE"s and "NEVER AGAIN"s into excellent, internationally important artworks. This short novel is definitely one of those.

There is a dark, bitter gallows humor in the recounting of the many and various forms of violence in the story. The fact is, there are many very uncomfortable line-crossings of every sort in this family's trip through modernizing Korea. What I understood from this is that the author, who presents, eg, sexual assault as a fact of life, was not sensationalizing the existence of it, or trying to invalidate the experience of it; but was instead making the awful aftermath, the survival of its brutalizing horror, the point of her story...not the acts themselves but the aftermath of quotidian sameness that every victim of violence must, in fact, return to. Dinner still needs to be made, the garden still needs to be weeded, there are bricks to be made and laid, your tedious humdrum existence chugs right along...and that, my spoiled fellow Westerners, is how life is.

Not sensationalized. Not minimized. Lived over, through, shoved into a dark closet and sealed as tightly as is possible. No, it's never going away; yes, it bursts out in strange places in one's post-traumatic life that often cause more trauma; most of the world calls that "getting on with it." We're conditioned to condemn this pragmatism as being less than ideal. It is, in fact, the best and only way poor people all over the planet cope. It is a very privileged response to decry this kind of humor masking awful untold, untellable agony as perpetuating a system that is entrenched.

Not everyone is equipped to rebel, to spark change, and those people deserve our respectful attention, too.

That doesn't make this an easy read but I think it makes this an important read.

By its very nature, a story contains adjustments and embellishments depending on the perspective of the person telling it, depending on the listener’s convenience, depending on the storyteller’s skills. Reader, you will believe what you want to believe.