Reviews

Starsza pani z nożem by Gu Byeong-mo

Only show reviews with written explanations

shai3d's review against another edition

Too slow

raulbime's review against another edition

Although I'm marking this as finished, I've given up on this at the 40% mark, and, as this site informs me, I've been reading this book for six weeks now meaning I'm making little progress and painfully dulled despite my expectations. The premise of the book, a sixty five year old woman working as an assassin for a death dealing agency, attracted me to it. But there's little else that held my attention, which is odd as the book itself is filled with well described details of stealthy murders and violence, and what with our minds being shaped to accommodate this as the most enthralling form of entertainment there is.

In the end this book isn't necessarily to blame for my disappointment, I am. It never pretended to be anything it wasn't. And honestly it was intriguing in the beginning, and might interest those who like stories with a premise like this one. It's not everyday that books about older people, especially women, are written and published, much less translated into English. So reading about an old woman who uses the cloak of invisibility society wraps around the old as it pushes them towards the margins of society to become unseen and unheard as a tool in her trade as an assassin did thrill me, until it didn't. Honestly I've never been a big fan of detective/murder/"action" stories, and only tend to like them when there's more besides killings and when writers delve brilliantly into the societal conditions that produce violence, which is to say I kind of set myself up here. At the back of my mind as I read this, the only thing that echoed was this passage from[b:Transit|1793889|Transit|Anna Seghers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1188429527l/1793889._SY75_.jpg|2283306] by [a:Anna Seghers|262916|Anna Seghers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1235495804p2/262916.jpg]

"Aren't you thoroughly fed up with such thrilling stories? Aren't you sick of all these suspenseful tales about people surviving mortal danger by a hair, about breathtaking escapes? Me, I'm sick and tired of them. If something still thrills me today, then maybe it's an old worker's yarn about how many feet of wire he's drawn in the course of his long life and what tools he used, or the glow of the lamplight by which a few children are doing their homework."