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emsemsems's review against another edition
3.0
‘But not all wishes are fulfilled. It isn’t that hard, however, to put such petty desires to rest, and finally, to forget. People say at times that trivial desires have a greater hold on the soul. Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps that’s why many people leave somewhere only to return there for the same reason.’
Between a 3 and a 4, but I’m settling on a 3 for now because the unsettling ambiguity of the story (/stories) left me feeling rather frustrated. Glorious piece of writing, brilliantly translated by one of my favourite translators, Jung Yewon. Consistently bleak atmosphere throughout the whole novel. Seaside ‘gothic’ fiction with a touch of magical realism. Spectacular characterisation. Somewhat reminds me of [b:Tokyo Ueno Station|43398196|Tokyo Ueno Station|Miri Yū|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562758850l/43398196._SY75_.jpg|47328578] by Miri Yu – poverty, homelessness, death(s). If you’re in the mood for a story with a ‘happy ending’, stay away from these books! RTC.
paradis's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? N/A
2.0
arirang's review
4.0
Mannequin is another in the highly enjoyable, if rather under-promoted Library of Korean Literature from Dalkey Archive and I would hope to see it in contention for this year's Best Translated Book Award.
마네킹 (phoenetically Mannequin) was written by 최윤 (Ch'oe Yun - her preferred romanization) and translated into English by [a:Jung Yewon|14509018|Jung Yewon|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1471082247p2/14509018.jpg].
It is a story both fascinating and moving, with wonderfully translated, almost ethereal, prose.
Jung Yewon is fast emerging as a star of Korean-English translation, alongside Deborah Smith, having translated [b:Vaseline Buddha|27135623|Vaseline Buddha|Young-moon Jung|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1457528015s/27135623.jpg|47172688], [b:One Hundred Shadows|30967023|One Hundred Shadows|Hwang Jungeun|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1469021712s/30967023.jpg|51582202], [b:No One Writes Back|17591572|No One Writes Back|Eun-Jin Jang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1379899813s/17591572.jpg|24532485] and parts of [b:A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories|17591565|A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories|Young-moon Jung|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1379898439s/17591565.jpg|24532478], the latter two also in the Dalkey series. Her translation has a style which I find intriguing but difficult to describe: she both renders the books into excellent English but retains a translated/Korean feel to the phrasing.
It centres on the story of Jini (지니), born as Yi Jina (이 지나) into a poor family but discovered as a baby model aged just 3 months, while her mother was selling chinese characters in a market, and now aged 17 and highly successful, in great demand for her ability to help sell any product with her stunning and haunting beauty and her ability to act different emotions.
Jini's success has lifted the family from poverty into riches and she is essentially the product of a family business. Her brother "Shark" (all the characters have marine nicknames) is her business manager, her sister "Starfish" manages the household, and a lady "Conch" lives with them full-time as Jini's trainer. Her mother "Agar-Agar" is present in body, but largely absent in spirit, and her father dead.
As Conch tells us: Sometimes in my dreams, all of us - Shark, Starfish, Agar-Agar and I - turn into carnivores who feed on Jini's body. But Joni's body doesn't shrink or disappear, so put feeding continues in my dreams.
As the product, Jini must be kept healthy so even as a little girl:
Flowers and grass where thorns or aphids might be hiding, flavoured milk or baby food she kept pestering for, snacks or fruits, a shower of sunshine after a bath when she would squirm around naked, a baby swing that swing back and forth, making her laugh, nails or shards of glass, dirt littered with broken pieces of china wear ... all these things were dangerous and off limits for Jini.
The novel tells what happens when one-day, calmly and with no real trigger other than just feeling it is time, Jini decides to run away from this life:
She looked back with a quiet sadness on her life up to then, not too long, as you do when you've made an unwitting mistake.... Actually, she couldn't understand why she felt sad. She wasn't unhappy, nor was she happy. She'd always had to throw herself into the work that came in incessantly, so she never had the time to thing about things such as happiness or unhappiness. For a long time, in fact, devoting herself to the basic survival of those around her had been the source of her little happiness. But now, she'd done what she could.
She and the individual family members are each left to each find their own destiny in life. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different characters, mostly in the first person but with Agar-Agar and Jini's told in the third-person.
Jini stopped speaking following an incident when she was 9 around which the books spirals, an event which seemed to also cost her father the will to live.
That was it. She lost her words because she came face to face with a world that required no words. It began as a feeling, as if a solid metal sheet were pressing down on we heart. The pain was in her heart, but the two hands that were causing the pain were on her neck. She opened her eyes, but couldn't see anything. What she remembered from that night was the touch of the hands taking turns, squeezing her neck. Her exceptionally long and slender neck bore it for a long time.
Agar Agar is also haunted by this incident, and as her older daughter describes her: she's, what should I say, someone who prays for the peace of all mankind. That's why she climbs mountains so often.
She feels guilt towards Jini (The body of the youngest had always been a fruit for everyone else in the family to feed on.) and after Jini leaves she feels both liberated (she deliberately unlocks the doors of the house each night, almost hoping Jini leaves) but becomes even more frenzied in her mountain retreats and praying.
The mute (and increasingly deaf) Jini communicates with Conch (Kim Chanhee) [given the nickname because her ears looks like conch shells] by writing on each other's palms. Conch lives for Jini:
Jini is the source of all my joy. I have never encountered a body with such expressions, lines and volume as I've found in Jini's ...
I made Jini who she is today, but it would only be fair to say that Jini, too, made me who I am.
Although Jini's account suggests that in part this is because everything else in Conch's life that she has wanted has slipped from her grasp:
When Conch wished for a bright, clear day, it was always cloudy the next day. None of the men Conch wanted reciprocated her feelings. The things Conch wanted were always out of her reach, and because she was adamant, what she wanted could never be hers.
Indeed Conch first met Jini as Conch was recovering from the break-up of a relationship. The 9-10 year old Jini, sensing her hurt, made the comment: "Did someone hurt you? ... Did someone squeeze your neck?", The words I'd dismissed as the meaningless babble of a little girl but whose significance only becomes clear to Conch later on.
Shark [a Korean pun - his name 상호 (Sang-Ho) sounding like the Korean word 상어 (sangeo) for shark - while in his early twenties is a ruthless and highly successful dealmaker, who obsessively works-out, and prone to violence, harbouring some deep-seated hostility within:
"I probably got into the habit of working out while struggling against my hatred for the world that took hold of me abruptly. ... I put my efforts into learning how to destroy successfully, shout effectively, and home in on a vital spot when making an attack."
After Jini leaves he carries on maximising the value of the family estate, towards his ultimate goal, to live out his days (he decides he will not aged past 23) on a tiny island of his own, isolated from the world.
Jini's older sister Starfish (이 정아, Yi Jeong-a) is almost, but crucially not quite, as beautiful as her sister, but overshadowed by her. Even her ceremony to enter elementary school is attended by none of the family as it was also the day they signed Jini's first professional contract as a child model. She has an business-like incestuous relationship with Shark: she occasionally sleeps with him in exchange for shares in Jini's "stock" I increased my share to include Jini's hands, nape and neck.
Another character sucked into Jini's orbit, and the book, is "Lionfish", a oceanography researcher and scuba diving enthusiast. As the book opens, Lionfish is diving off the coast of Jeju Island (in passing, my favourite holiday resort) with his partner (in the lab, the water and romantically) Pink Anemone, on the eve of their wedding. But Jini, in one of her last ever jobs before she runs away, is also filming a commercial for air conditioners underwater. As Lionfish explains:
My prolonged drifting is finally coming to an end, and a life of stability is about to start. The moment I thought that, I saw the most dazzling thing in the world and my life was upended in an instant.
A little goddess, wearing a thin, transparent blue suit, came down to me under the sea, curled up like a fetus in the mother's womb, swaying in the water, eyes peacefully closed.
Obsessed by the brief vision of his little goddess, he loses his wife on their wedding day, and goes hunting for Jini, eventually meeting and teaming up with Conch, towards the same goal.
As for Jini, despite being a major star she managed to journey around Korea unrecognised. This isn't a novel for gritty realism so how she does this, or indeed the logistics of her life on the road, are simply not a concern.
Instead we see her take on a spiritual aspect. Far from recognising her, people seem to see her as a blank slate in which they recognise who they are seeking: she'd met many people who to her for someone else. They spoke to her or followed her, seeing in her a lover, a sister, a lost daughter or granddaughter.
She starts to communicate via dance, spending the days in a town square. As with her apperance, and although her dances are actually simple and repetitive, people "came to see her dance every day, could not skip even a single day, as it seemed to them she whispered the words they most wanted to hear again
And night she lives in a high and almost inaccessible cave, increasingly at peace with the world:
She quietly took in the sky that was spread out before her, the sky far away, and the sky even farther away; the sea that could be seen only during the season when the world of trees could be described as one of straight lines and curves: and the scenery around her that she didn't really need to see
Recommended
See also the reviews from the always excellent:
Tony's reading list: https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2018/05/10/mannequin-by-choe-yun-review/
Complete Review: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/korea/choe_yun.htm
마네킹 (phoenetically Mannequin) was written by 최윤 (Ch'oe Yun - her preferred romanization) and translated into English by [a:Jung Yewon|14509018|Jung Yewon|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1471082247p2/14509018.jpg].
It is a story both fascinating and moving, with wonderfully translated, almost ethereal, prose.
Jung Yewon is fast emerging as a star of Korean-English translation, alongside Deborah Smith, having translated [b:Vaseline Buddha|27135623|Vaseline Buddha|Young-moon Jung|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1457528015s/27135623.jpg|47172688], [b:One Hundred Shadows|30967023|One Hundred Shadows|Hwang Jungeun|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1469021712s/30967023.jpg|51582202], [b:No One Writes Back|17591572|No One Writes Back|Eun-Jin Jang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1379899813s/17591572.jpg|24532485] and parts of [b:A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories|17591565|A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories|Young-moon Jung|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1379898439s/17591565.jpg|24532478], the latter two also in the Dalkey series. Her translation has a style which I find intriguing but difficult to describe: she both renders the books into excellent English but retains a translated/Korean feel to the phrasing.
It centres on the story of Jini (지니), born as Yi Jina (이 지나) into a poor family but discovered as a baby model aged just 3 months, while her mother was selling chinese characters in a market, and now aged 17 and highly successful, in great demand for her ability to help sell any product with her stunning and haunting beauty and her ability to act different emotions.
Jini's success has lifted the family from poverty into riches and she is essentially the product of a family business. Her brother "Shark" (all the characters have marine nicknames) is her business manager, her sister "Starfish" manages the household, and a lady "Conch" lives with them full-time as Jini's trainer. Her mother "Agar-Agar" is present in body, but largely absent in spirit, and her father dead.
As Conch tells us: Sometimes in my dreams, all of us - Shark, Starfish, Agar-Agar and I - turn into carnivores who feed on Jini's body. But Joni's body doesn't shrink or disappear, so put feeding continues in my dreams.
As the product, Jini must be kept healthy so even as a little girl:
Flowers and grass where thorns or aphids might be hiding, flavoured milk or baby food she kept pestering for, snacks or fruits, a shower of sunshine after a bath when she would squirm around naked, a baby swing that swing back and forth, making her laugh, nails or shards of glass, dirt littered with broken pieces of china wear ... all these things were dangerous and off limits for Jini.
The novel tells what happens when one-day, calmly and with no real trigger other than just feeling it is time, Jini decides to run away from this life:
She looked back with a quiet sadness on her life up to then, not too long, as you do when you've made an unwitting mistake.... Actually, she couldn't understand why she felt sad. She wasn't unhappy, nor was she happy. She'd always had to throw herself into the work that came in incessantly, so she never had the time to thing about things such as happiness or unhappiness. For a long time, in fact, devoting herself to the basic survival of those around her had been the source of her little happiness. But now, she'd done what she could.
She and the individual family members are each left to each find their own destiny in life. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different characters, mostly in the first person but with Agar-Agar and Jini's told in the third-person.
Jini stopped speaking following an incident when she was 9 around which the books spirals, an event which seemed to also cost her father the will to live.
That was it. She lost her words because she came face to face with a world that required no words. It began as a feeling, as if a solid metal sheet were pressing down on we heart. The pain was in her heart, but the two hands that were causing the pain were on her neck. She opened her eyes, but couldn't see anything. What she remembered from that night was the touch of the hands taking turns, squeezing her neck. Her exceptionally long and slender neck bore it for a long time.
Agar Agar is also haunted by this incident, and as her older daughter describes her: she's, what should I say, someone who prays for the peace of all mankind. That's why she climbs mountains so often.
She feels guilt towards Jini (The body of the youngest had always been a fruit for everyone else in the family to feed on.) and after Jini leaves she feels both liberated (she deliberately unlocks the doors of the house each night, almost hoping Jini leaves) but becomes even more frenzied in her mountain retreats and praying.
The mute (and increasingly deaf) Jini communicates with Conch (Kim Chanhee) [given the nickname because her ears looks like conch shells] by writing on each other's palms. Conch lives for Jini:
Jini is the source of all my joy. I have never encountered a body with such expressions, lines and volume as I've found in Jini's ...
I made Jini who she is today, but it would only be fair to say that Jini, too, made me who I am.
Although Jini's account suggests that in part this is because everything else in Conch's life that she has wanted has slipped from her grasp:
When Conch wished for a bright, clear day, it was always cloudy the next day. None of the men Conch wanted reciprocated her feelings. The things Conch wanted were always out of her reach, and because she was adamant, what she wanted could never be hers.
Indeed Conch first met Jini as Conch was recovering from the break-up of a relationship. The 9-10 year old Jini, sensing her hurt, made the comment: "Did someone hurt you? ... Did someone squeeze your neck?", The words I'd dismissed as the meaningless babble of a little girl but whose significance only becomes clear to Conch later on.
Shark [a Korean pun - his name 상호 (Sang-Ho) sounding like the Korean word 상어 (sangeo) for shark - while in his early twenties is a ruthless and highly successful dealmaker, who obsessively works-out, and prone to violence, harbouring some deep-seated hostility within:
"I probably got into the habit of working out while struggling against my hatred for the world that took hold of me abruptly. ... I put my efforts into learning how to destroy successfully, shout effectively, and home in on a vital spot when making an attack."
After Jini leaves he carries on maximising the value of the family estate, towards his ultimate goal, to live out his days (he decides he will not aged past 23) on a tiny island of his own, isolated from the world.
Jini's older sister Starfish (이 정아, Yi Jeong-a) is almost, but crucially not quite, as beautiful as her sister, but overshadowed by her. Even her ceremony to enter elementary school is attended by none of the family as it was also the day they signed Jini's first professional contract as a child model. She has an business-like incestuous relationship with Shark: she occasionally sleeps with him in exchange for shares in Jini's "stock" I increased my share to include Jini's hands, nape and neck.
Another character sucked into Jini's orbit, and the book, is "Lionfish", a oceanography researcher and scuba diving enthusiast. As the book opens, Lionfish is diving off the coast of Jeju Island (in passing, my favourite holiday resort) with his partner (in the lab, the water and romantically) Pink Anemone, on the eve of their wedding. But Jini, in one of her last ever jobs before she runs away, is also filming a commercial for air conditioners underwater. As Lionfish explains:
My prolonged drifting is finally coming to an end, and a life of stability is about to start. The moment I thought that, I saw the most dazzling thing in the world and my life was upended in an instant.
A little goddess, wearing a thin, transparent blue suit, came down to me under the sea, curled up like a fetus in the mother's womb, swaying in the water, eyes peacefully closed.
Obsessed by the brief vision of his little goddess, he loses his wife on their wedding day, and goes hunting for Jini, eventually meeting and teaming up with Conch, towards the same goal.
As for Jini, despite being a major star she managed to journey around Korea unrecognised. This isn't a novel for gritty realism so how she does this, or indeed the logistics of her life on the road, are simply not a concern.
Instead we see her take on a spiritual aspect. Far from recognising her, people seem to see her as a blank slate in which they recognise who they are seeking: she'd met many people who to her for someone else. They spoke to her or followed her, seeing in her a lover, a sister, a lost daughter or granddaughter.
She starts to communicate via dance, spending the days in a town square. As with her apperance, and although her dances are actually simple and repetitive, people "came to see her dance every day, could not skip even a single day, as it seemed to them she whispered the words they most wanted to hear again
And night she lives in a high and almost inaccessible cave, increasingly at peace with the world:
She quietly took in the sky that was spread out before her, the sky far away, and the sky even farther away; the sea that could be seen only during the season when the world of trees could be described as one of straight lines and curves: and the scenery around her that she didn't really need to see
Recommended
See also the reviews from the always excellent:
Tony's reading list: https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2018/05/10/mannequin-by-choe-yun-review/
Complete Review: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/korea/choe_yun.htm
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