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Summary
Summary
The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness is a stark and lyrical work that follows a teen-aged girl who has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory while struggling to achieve her dream of finishing school and becoming a writer. Shin sets the this complex and nuanced coming of age story against the backdrop of Korea's industrial sweatshops of the 1970's and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Korea's economy out of the ashes of the war. Millions of teen-aged girls from the countryside descended on Seoul in the late 1970's. These girls formed the bottom of the city's social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored. Richly autobiographical, the novel lays bare the conflict and confusion Shin goes through as she confronts her past and the sweeping social change that has taken place in her homeland over the past half century. The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness has been cited in Korea as one of the most important literary novels of the decade, and cements Shin's legacy as one of the most insightful and exciting young writers of her generation.
Author Notes
Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea's most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She is the author of I'll Be Right There and Please Look After Mom, which was a New York Times bestseller and a Man Asian Literary Prize winner.
Reviews (4)
Kirkus Review
A successful yet troubled South Korean writer looks back on her teenage years and her struggle to work, learn, and survive during "solitary days lived inside an industrial labor genre painting." Drawn in part from its author's own experiences, this novel by prizewinner Shin (I'll Be Right There, 2014, etc.) takes an unsparing look at the near-Victorian working and living conditions suffered in her country during the late 1970s. The unnamed narrator leaves her rural home at age 16 to take a job in an electronics factory in Seoul, where efforts to unionize are resisted by the company at every turn. Her living accommodation is "a lone room" (one of several incantatory phrases in the book), badly heated and ventilated, and shared with several other family members. Money is tight, food is scarce, and the only way to get ahead is to study at night after a full day on the production line. Shin's unemotional delivery and understated yet devastating perspective on her country's expectations and norms are familiar from her earlier novels, but this book's grim glimpse into the lives of factory girls is notably haunting. The narrator is fortunate: she is encouraged by some kind figures, including a teacher who gives her a novel and urges her to write, and she clings to her dream of creativity. Now, however, looking back 16 years later, famous and materially comfortable in a transformed society, the narrator still feels that the wounds of her youth are unhealed, notably those caused by the tragic death of a friend, which "turned me into an infinite blank." Yet the act of writing this book and the poetic final fugue suggest release and restoration are possible. There's a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age story described as "not quite fact and not quite fiction." Allusive and structurally sophisticated, it melds Shin's characteristic themes of politics, literature, and painful experience into a mysteriously compelling whole. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A writer struggles with revisiting her teenage years working in a Seoul factory in the latest novel by the author of Please Look after Mom (2011). The narrator who describes the recounting as not quite fact and not quite fiction, but something in between is, at 32, a literary success. Now, for the first time, she's laying bare the struggles of her youth when, at 16, she left the farm she'd grown up on and, with her cousin, journeyed to Seoul to live in a tiny apartment with her oldest brother. She and her cousin work in a factory so that they can attend the city's industrial high school. The girls are quickly caught in the middle of the struggle between the factory's administration and the fledgling union, which the administration tries to stamp out by withholding wages and firing members. Shin's book not only vividly evokes the political unrest and fraught city life in 1970s Seoul but also deftly explores the struggles of a writer attempting to come to terms with her past through her work.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
KYUNG-SOOK SHIN'S "The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness" begins with an unnamed novelist writing in isolation on Korea's Jeju Island. She informs us of a recent call from an old friend, someone who has read her work and says, "You don't write about us- You seem to write quite a lot about your childhood, and also about college, and about love, but there was nothing about us." Rattled, the novelist looks back on her teenage years. Why indeed hasn't she written about her classmates and friends from that time? What we come to learn is that those years were spent in assembly lines in factories and a school for industrial workers. The 1970s was a harsh postwar period, when Korea was ruled by a dictator, when political dissent meant banishment and safe working conditions were not even an afterthought but a laughable request. The novelist's peers had fingers paralyzed from wrapping thousands of candies a day and were sickened from regular exposure to lead. They were slowly destroyed, like the characters in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." So the novelist-narrator has avoided reminiscing about this period of her life for understandable reasons. But as she does look back, what we get is a landscape of trauma, as she examines her memories and reacquaints herself with the present. This is an autobiographical novel: Shin really did spend time in a factory as a teenager. She really did become a writer. The narrator, who may or may not be the author, is writing this novel in the present as she remembers the past. To that end, "The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness" includes many flashbacks, even as the main narrative is set in the present. Shin's treatment of time could have been disconcerting - the flashbacks could become wearisome, but they don't, illustrating instead the narrator's trauma. Shin is adept with differentiating time shifts, writing, as she puts it, "the past in present tense; the present in past tense." That pragmatic decision also plays out on a figurative level: The narrator has spent her whole life trying not to remember, and in doing so, the past is present in everything. The narrator's dream is to write. And it is through writing that she exorcises what haunts her. In her everyday life, she is practically immobile. She talks to friends on the phone, only to never meet up. She receives a request to visit a school and stands "frozen for a while, as if ... under siege." She is a master of avoidance, and yet, in the end, she is able to show us her pain in her writing, and to purge herself. Shin has long conveyed the consciousness of a nation. In an earlier novel, "Please Look After Mom," which was originally published after "The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness" (they were published out of sequence here in the United States), she explored the guilt and regret felt by the current generation for the sacrifices made by the previous one. Shin was recently accused of plagiarizing, when a fellow writer pointed out passages in her 1994 short story "Legend" that were almost identical to passages in a 1961 story by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. In response, Shin said she couldn't remember reading Mishima's work, but she also admitted being "in a situation where I don't trust my own memory." "It's all my fault," she concluded. "I haven't been careful enough." Her words echo those of the characters in her work. Even as they evade blame - what was done was by accident, what was done was regretful, what was done was unfortunate - they feel riddled with guilt. The past continues to haunt Shin. And for many people, that may be punishment enough. In "The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness," Shin writes about a time and setting that might seem remote to many Americans, but in many ways her specificity is universal; we all have a monster that has no face, and which we try to avoid. Shin paints her own monster for us. This is an autobiographical novel: Shin really did spend time in a factory as a teenager. CHRISTINE HYUNG-OAK LEE'S memoir, "Whole," and novel, "The Golem of Seoul," are forthcoming.
Library Journal Review
Credited with revitalizing Korea's publishing industry, Shin's 2011 Please Look After Mom (the author's debut in English) made this international powerhouse the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her latest, arriving stateside 20 years after its Korean publication, is part memoir, part portrait-of-an-artist-as-a-teenager, and part writing treatise. Shin is the eponymous girl at 16, sent from her village to live in a "lone room" in Seoul with her oldest brother and cousin to work tedious hours in an electronics factory for the opportunity to attend high school at night. Korea in 1978 is an economically and politically unstable country whose youth will pay the highest price for the phenomenal success to come. Sixteen years later, Shin's an established writer, contacted by a former classmate: "You don't write about us.. Could it be you're ashamed?" The years of elision yield to fraught memories: her reclamation of her own name and age, her tenuous relationships, the teacher who gifted her with a book and the belief she could be the novelist she would become. verdict This work stands the test of time. Isolation and suicide among young adults worldwide have only tragically multiplied, making Girl urgently auspicious. Described at beginning and end as "not quite fact and not quite fiction," this book is essential reading.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.