Publisher's Weekly Review
South Korean author Yun's spare but provocative novel (after the collection Table for One) offers perceptive satire laced with disconcerting imagery. In her mid-30s, Yona Ko has devoted the last decade of her life to her employer, Jungle, which offers package tours to areas of the world ravaged by disasters, from hurricanes to nuclear meltdowns. After being sexually assaulted by her boss and assigned to a new role, Yona suspects she's being pushed out of the company. On the verge of quitting, she's given a new opportunity: evaluate the disaster ecosystem on a Vietnamese island (a sinkhole, a volcano) and determine whether the destination should be kept in Jungle's portfolio. Upon arriving, Yona soon realizes that the island's power brokers are aware that their tourist income is imperiled, and she is appalled when an investor tells her of a plan to engineer a sinkhole during a village festival that would kill at least 100 people, after which they would use international aid for urban redevelopment. In Yona's increasingly bizarre encounters, she learns just how severe the local environmental degradation is and the frightening extent of corporate greed. Yun cleverly combines absurdity with legitimate horror and mounting dread. With its arresting, nightmarish island scenario, this work speaks volumes about the human cost of tourism in developing countries. (Aug.)
Guardian Review
Following a spate of recent fiction considering the strange intersection of our work and leisure lives - novels such as Ling Ma's apocalyptic satire Severance and Sayaka Murata's oddly affecting Convenience Store Woman - The Disaster Tourist offers up another fresh and sharp story about life under late capitalism. Yona Kim is a programme manager for Jungle, a Seoul company that specialises in curating holiday packages in disaster zones. On trips to areas ravaged by tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, travellers journey through "the following stages: shock ? sympathy and compassion, and maybe discomfort ? gratefulness for their own lives ? a sense of responsibility and the feeling that they'd learned a lesson, and maybe an inkling of superiority for having survived". When Yona's own life is struck by disaster in the form of a predatory boss she numbly agrees to go on a "no-strings-attached business trip" to the island of Mui, whose major attraction turns out to be an underwhelming sinkhole. Here, Yona and her fellow travellers expose themselves to the islanders' stories of trauma and grief in order to access a second-hand emotion, but end up sinking only into a feeling of boredom or disquietude. Soon Yona finds herself caught up in a scheme to manufacture a more dramatic disaster in Mui in order to save the island's economy and her own professional standing. Translator Lizzie Buehler deftly coveys the subtle tonalities of the prose, variously graceful and light (when Yona goes into work, she feels "like a dandelion seed that had somehow drifted into a building"), witty and absurd, then suspenseful, even terror-filled. Descriptions of the climactic disaster are flattened and attenuated, becoming strangely euphoric as the narrative focuses on all the anonymous lives shattered, people dispossessed by forces beyond any of the characters' imaginations. Ultimately, the plot details aren't always precise enough to convey the complexity of exactly what is at stake, or with whom moral responsibility sits, while a tenuous love story adds another layer of narrative complication. But this is an entertaining eco-thriller that sets out to illuminate the way climate change is inextricably bound up with the pressures of global capitalism.
Kirkus Review
A burned-out employee at a South Korean tourism company is shipped off on an adventure of her own that slowly spirals out of control. Jungle seems to be just the kind of company made for a world regularly besieged by hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and all manner of tragedy. It packages the events into attractive deals for "disaster tourists," people looking for a new kind of thrill in the experience-driven Instagram age. For 10 years, Yona Ko has worked at Jungle, chasing disasters and creating the next bestselling package. But when Yona speaks up after her boss sexually assaults her, she is shipped off on a work trip. She must travel to Mui, a distant island, part of Jungle's disaster programming catalog. Years ago, a giant sinkhole appeared on Mui, and tourists flocked in to soak up the aftermath. But Mui is losing its luster, and Yona must grade its worthiness on Jungle's list of offerings. Through a series of unfortunate events, Yona discovers just how much is on the line for the desperate citizens of Mui. If they lose the Jungle program's visitors, they lose everything. Yun's novel spirals into increasingly bizarre events as Mui battles for its very survival and, alarmingly, pulls out all the stops. The Jungle is an effective model for capitalism--the Upton Sinclair echo might resonate with some. Mui too efficiently fills in for every community in the world pitted against the rest, scraping the bottom of the barrel for survival as it faces an increasingly harsh reality. But Yona remains frustratingly opaque, her background story needing more color. The taut storyline keeps the narrative moving at a tight pace even if the takeaways feel ham-handed at times. A sharp sendup of society's obsession with the next hot thing--and the steep toll it extracts on very real lives. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Yona is an employee of Jungle, a South Korean company that arranges expensive tours and vacation packages to areas ravaged by such disasters as droughts, typhoons, tsunamis, avalanches, and earthquakes. Despite her 10-year employment at Jungle, 33-year old Yona is not impervious to sexual harassment and endures multiple abuses at the hands of her supervisor. To avoid her resignation, the company offers her an all-expense-paid trip to one of their fledgling vacation destinations. She agrees to go as an evaluator and joins four vacationers traveling to Mui, an island off the coast of Vietnam. Not only is the destination spot managed poorly, the featured attraction is a lackluster sinkhole. Yona uncovers the resort's intricate and risky plan to, unbeknownst to Jungle, engineer a bigger sinkhole featuring fake casualties to be captured on video with dramatic aplomb. As Yona becomes entangled in the mesh of reality and a manufactured catastrophe, her situation quickly spins out of control. Ko-Eun's ecothriller skillfully explores the intertwined themes of tourism, livelihood, greed, and the value of human life.
