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3.56 AVERAGE
3.56 AVERAGE
Un-Su Kim’s The Plotters focuses on contract killer Reseng, who grew up in the Doghouse, a library run by Old Raccoon, who functions more or less as a booking agent for contract killers. It Kim’s South Korea, contract killers seem to be prevalent and busy, caring out the orders of the wealthy and connected politicians and entrepreneurs. In fact, contract killers are so common they are driving down the price.
The first story opens with Reseng sighting in on his prey, an old man who is watering flowers and playing with his dog. He decides to wait until morning and is found by the old man who invites him in for supper. He spends a lovely evening with the old man which leads to a small decision, truly a small decision, but one that leads to the next story and the next and the next. Along the way, Reseng finds love, uncovers some plots, challenges a superior competitor, and resolves to save the world, in his way.
The Plotters is an unusual novel in that its eleven chapters can each function on their own as a short story. In fact, I think I like it better thinking of it as an anthology than a novel. While this is a book about a contract killer and several people die, I have to admit it does not feel gruesome or gratuitous, which is kind of strange if you think about it. The death is so much part of the character’s story and development and it’s never something enjoyed. Well, there may be an exception but that would be a spoiler.
I enjoyed the story, I liked Reseng. The women’s cabal to save the world is a madcap thread that provides a surreal twist to this otherwise noir story. They add comic relief, the ridiculousness of it all makes it a sharper satire. In the end, I really loved this new genre Kim creates, Manic Noir.
There is a moral to the story and that is where it gets a bit heavy-handed. There are a few sentences that would sit in perfect comfort on a gauzy soft-focus photo with lots of sunlight and flowers wearing a pretty, script font. The reader realizes without any aphorisms that Reseng has lived a life he never chose. We do want him to choose, perhaps sooner, perhaps more wisely.
The Plotters will be published January 29th. I received an e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley.
The Plotters at Doubleday | Penguin Random House
Un-Su Kim bio at Barbara J. Zitwer Agency
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/9780385544382/
The first story opens with Reseng sighting in on his prey, an old man who is watering flowers and playing with his dog. He decides to wait until morning and is found by the old man who invites him in for supper. He spends a lovely evening with the old man which leads to a small decision, truly a small decision, but one that leads to the next story and the next and the next. Along the way, Reseng finds love, uncovers some plots, challenges a superior competitor, and resolves to save the world, in his way.
The Plotters is an unusual novel in that its eleven chapters can each function on their own as a short story. In fact, I think I like it better thinking of it as an anthology than a novel. While this is a book about a contract killer and several people die, I have to admit it does not feel gruesome or gratuitous, which is kind of strange if you think about it. The death is so much part of the character’s story and development and it’s never something enjoyed. Well, there may be an exception but that would be a spoiler.
I enjoyed the story, I liked Reseng. The women’s cabal to save the world is a madcap thread that provides a surreal twist to this otherwise noir story. They add comic relief, the ridiculousness of it all makes it a sharper satire. In the end, I really loved this new genre Kim creates, Manic Noir.
There is a moral to the story and that is where it gets a bit heavy-handed. There are a few sentences that would sit in perfect comfort on a gauzy soft-focus photo with lots of sunlight and flowers wearing a pretty, script font. The reader realizes without any aphorisms that Reseng has lived a life he never chose. We do want him to choose, perhaps sooner, perhaps more wisely.
The Plotters will be published January 29th. I received an e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley.
The Plotters at Doubleday | Penguin Random House
Un-Su Kim bio at Barbara J. Zitwer Agency
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/9780385544382/
Begins intriguingly. A satire of alienation and aphasia in the face of nihilistic capitalism, played out as an absurd turf war between thuggish, monastic assassins employed by society's elite. The opening passage, an assassination gone digressive, is reminiscent of sleek roman durs, and also unique: involving and oddly moving in its precise blend of tones...
Empathetic, darkly humorous, melancholy. Haunted with vague foreboding.
...but the rest of the book slowly loses steam. And eventually reduces into what it always was, a cliché.
The literary fic version of this same old thing: Minimalist noir. As that it's not bad, excellently written if thin, aight as an example of the genre, with its own insights and details and characters to like or dislike – wrinkles on the formula – but also frustrating, because I wanted it to be more.
Empathetic, darkly humorous, melancholy. Haunted with vague foreboding.
...but the rest of the book slowly loses steam. And eventually reduces into what it always was, a cliché.
The literary fic version of this same old thing: Minimalist noir. As that it's not bad, excellently written if thin, aight as an example of the genre, with its own insights and details and characters to like or dislike – wrinkles on the formula – but also frustrating, because I wanted it to be more.
"‘Reading books will doom you to a life of fear and shame. Now, do you still feel like reading?’"
The Guardian newspaper recently heralded Korean thriller writers as starting a new wave of translated popular fiction to succeed Scandinavian noir -https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/03/the-new-scandi-noir-the-korean-writers-reinventing-the-thriller - and the book on which they centered their article was this: 설계자들 by 김언수 (Kim Un-su). A more literal translation of the original title would be designers or architects, but the publisher and translator have gone with The Plotters.
The translation is from Sora Kim-Russell - the 7th author I have read through her translations, the others being Gong Jiyoung, Pyun Hye-Young, Hwang Sok-yong, Bae Suah, Park Hyoung-su and Shin Kyung-sook, and she is one of my favourite Korean-English translators alongside Deborah Smith and Jung Yewon. Her translations tend to be towards the reads-naturally-in-English end of the spectrum, certainly as compared to Jung's, which makes this a highly accessible read, albeit one with an appropriate amount of local colour: e.g. as soon as page 2 we get a description of a man with 'a permanent grin, like a carved wooden hahoe mask' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hahoetal).
As with two other books in this genre - The Hole by Pyun Hye-Young (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2252009529) and The Good Son by Jeong You-jeong (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2391289859) this isn't a type of book I would have naturally read in English: my interest is more in Korean literary fiction and in in pure literary terms, this is not, and does not purport to be, in the same class as Bae Suah, Han Kang or Hwang Sok-yong say.
Nevertheless it is a well-written book, humourous and quirky, with some fascinating characters, and one which rises above the constraints of genre by not following too linear or (except perhaps in the closing pages) predictable a path.
The subject of the novel, Reseng, is an assassin-for-hire, adopted as a young child by Old Raccoon who historically has run Korea's contract assassination business from The Old Library, one that developed in Korea after the end of military rule:
"What sped up the assassination industry was the new regime of democratically-elected civilian administrations that sought the trappings of morality. Maybe they thought that by stamping their foreheads with the words It’s okay, we’re not the military, they could fool the people. But power is all the same deep down, no matter what it looks like. As Deng Xiaoping once said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.’The problem was that the newly democratic government couldn’t use that basement on Namsan to beat the crap out of the pains in the arse. And so, in order to avoid the eyes of the people and the press, to avoid generating evidence of their own complex chain of command and execution, and to avoid any future responsibility, they started doing business on the sly with contractors. And thus began the age of outsourcing. It was cheaper and simpler than taking care of it themselves, but best of all, there was less clean-up. On the rare occasion that the shit did hit the fan, the government was safe and clear of it. While contractors were being hauled off to jail, all they had to do was look shocked and appalled in front of the news cameras and say things like, ‘What a terrible and unfortunate tragedy!’"
Although with changing times, particularly the growing demand from the private and corporate sector, his business, and his life, are under threat from competitors.
In the novel's world, the assassination requests come into the contractors via the plotters of the book's (English) title, who themselves take orders from end clients. Reseng very much subscribes to Lee Harvey Oswald's 'patsy' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbR6vHXD1j0) theory of assassination:
"Whenever an assassination came to light, the first person the police looked for was the shooter. In the end, all they wanted to know was: ‘Who pulled the trigger?’ When they did find whoever pulled the trigger, they fooled themselves into thinking everything had been solved.
...
‘Plotters are just pawns like us,’ Reseng said. ‘A request comes in, and they draw up the plans. There’s someone above them who tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter telling them what to do. You know what’s there if you keep going all the way to the top? Nothing. Just an empty chair.’"
But as the novel begins, Reseng is starting not to follow the rules. Sent to kill a former North Korean general, and someone who was himself a senior plotter in the South, he ends up having dinner with him, before completing his task. And when he finds a small bomb planted in his toilet:
"‘This would’ve blown your arse off.’
‘That tiny thing?’
‘The pressure is higher inside a toilet bowl. It’s like squeezing a firecracker in your hand when it goes off. Basically, when you sit down to take a shit, your arse forms a seal over the hole, creating the perfect conditions for this bomb to do maximum damage.’
‘Are you saying it could have killed me?’
‘Ever seen anyone survive without an arse?’"
he gets caught up in a world of memorably eccentric characters and complicated plots. The chief suspect for the toilet bomb for example "was working at a convenience store. After greeting customers with an overly loud ‘Welcome!’ she hit them with a bubbly ‘Help you find something?’ or butted in with a nosy ‘Ooh, I buy these biscuits too!’ Most customers ignored her. But she laughed anyway, indifferent, and kept tossing jokes at them while clacking away at the register, picking up items from the counter with an exaggerated sweep of her arm. When there were no customers, she chattered nonstop on the shop telephone, or cleaned the shelves and reorganised the already perfectly arranged items. Chatting or cleaning , cleaning or chatting. She looked like a child with an attention-deficit disorder."
And at one point he finds himself wondering what he has got involved in:
"Plotter, cross-eyed librarian, knitting-shop owner— what on earth were these three mismatched women doing together? And in this ridiculous shop, of all places, watched over by Papa Smurf and Winnie-the-Pooh and all the Teletubbies?"
Kim is very effective at creating these memorable characters, although one criticism would be that he doesn't always follow through or suggest any deeper significance. For example, Old Raccoon runs his business out of a library:
"he found it hard to believe that this quiet place had headquartered a den of assassins for the last ninety years. He marvelled at the thought that all those deaths, all those assassinations and unexplained disappearances and faked accidents and imprisonments and kidnappings, had been decided and plotted right here in this building. Who’d chosen this place from which to orchestrate such abominable acts? It was madness. It would have made more sense to set up camp in the office of the National Dry Cleaners Union, or the office of the Organising Committee to Revitalise Poultry Farming."
And Old Raccoon has a one-book-in, one-book-out policy to stocking his shelves that very much reflects my own:
"Old Raccoon used to order new books regularly, but would throw out the same number just as regularly ... When their time came, Old Raccoon placed a black strip around the discards. It was his own special form of sentencing, a funeral procedure for books that had reached the end of their life. The same way ageing assassins were added to a list and eliminated by cleaners when their time came. Of course, a book’s life span was determined by Old Raccoon alone, and neither Reseng nor the librarians could understand why certain books had to be tossed. The books with black bands were gathered by the librarian and stacked in the courtyard to be burned on Sunday afternoons, the librarian’s day off. Old Raccoon could have sold them to a secondhand bookshop or even to a recycler, but he insisted on burning them."
Old Raccoon himself only read two of the books, alternating between an English and German encyclopedia, but, to his horror (as per the opening quote) Reseng teaches himself as a child to read, and becomes an avid bibliophile:
"The cabinet under the sink was stacked with instant noodle cups, and next to his pillow and on the table were the books that he’d either brought with him from Seoul or bought at the local bookshop : Albert Camus’ Summer and The Plague, Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, Martin Monestier’s Suicides, Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon."
which is all wonderful colour - but doesn't then seem of any great significance in the later plot or character development.
Nevertheless, an atmospheric and enjoyable read, rather too quirky to count as noir.
As for a rating - a tricky one. For personal appreciation, given my literary tastes, 3 stars but as a recommendation for other, particularly those seeking an alternative to Stieg Larrson clones, a solid 4.
Thanks to the publisher's via Netgalley for the ARC.
The Guardian newspaper recently heralded Korean thriller writers as starting a new wave of translated popular fiction to succeed Scandinavian noir -https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/03/the-new-scandi-noir-the-korean-writers-reinventing-the-thriller - and the book on which they centered their article was this: 설계자들 by 김언수 (Kim Un-su). A more literal translation of the original title would be designers or architects, but the publisher and translator have gone with The Plotters.
The translation is from Sora Kim-Russell - the 7th author I have read through her translations, the others being Gong Jiyoung, Pyun Hye-Young, Hwang Sok-yong, Bae Suah, Park Hyoung-su and Shin Kyung-sook, and she is one of my favourite Korean-English translators alongside Deborah Smith and Jung Yewon. Her translations tend to be towards the reads-naturally-in-English end of the spectrum, certainly as compared to Jung's, which makes this a highly accessible read, albeit one with an appropriate amount of local colour: e.g. as soon as page 2 we get a description of a man with 'a permanent grin, like a carved wooden hahoe mask' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hahoetal).
As with two other books in this genre - The Hole by Pyun Hye-Young (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2252009529) and The Good Son by Jeong You-jeong (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2391289859) this isn't a type of book I would have naturally read in English: my interest is more in Korean literary fiction and in in pure literary terms, this is not, and does not purport to be, in the same class as Bae Suah, Han Kang or Hwang Sok-yong say.
Nevertheless it is a well-written book, humourous and quirky, with some fascinating characters, and one which rises above the constraints of genre by not following too linear or (except perhaps in the closing pages) predictable a path.
The subject of the novel, Reseng, is an assassin-for-hire, adopted as a young child by Old Raccoon who historically has run Korea's contract assassination business from The Old Library, one that developed in Korea after the end of military rule:
"What sped up the assassination industry was the new regime of democratically-elected civilian administrations that sought the trappings of morality. Maybe they thought that by stamping their foreheads with the words It’s okay, we’re not the military, they could fool the people. But power is all the same deep down, no matter what it looks like. As Deng Xiaoping once said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.’The problem was that the newly democratic government couldn’t use that basement on Namsan to beat the crap out of the pains in the arse. And so, in order to avoid the eyes of the people and the press, to avoid generating evidence of their own complex chain of command and execution, and to avoid any future responsibility, they started doing business on the sly with contractors. And thus began the age of outsourcing. It was cheaper and simpler than taking care of it themselves, but best of all, there was less clean-up. On the rare occasion that the shit did hit the fan, the government was safe and clear of it. While contractors were being hauled off to jail, all they had to do was look shocked and appalled in front of the news cameras and say things like, ‘What a terrible and unfortunate tragedy!’"
Although with changing times, particularly the growing demand from the private and corporate sector, his business, and his life, are under threat from competitors.
In the novel's world, the assassination requests come into the contractors via the plotters of the book's (English) title, who themselves take orders from end clients. Reseng very much subscribes to Lee Harvey Oswald's 'patsy' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbR6vHXD1j0) theory of assassination:
"Whenever an assassination came to light, the first person the police looked for was the shooter. In the end, all they wanted to know was: ‘Who pulled the trigger?’ When they did find whoever pulled the trigger, they fooled themselves into thinking everything had been solved.
...
‘Plotters are just pawns like us,’ Reseng said. ‘A request comes in, and they draw up the plans. There’s someone above them who tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter telling them what to do. You know what’s there if you keep going all the way to the top? Nothing. Just an empty chair.’"
But as the novel begins, Reseng is starting not to follow the rules. Sent to kill a former North Korean general, and someone who was himself a senior plotter in the South, he ends up having dinner with him, before completing his task. And when he finds a small bomb planted in his toilet:
"‘This would’ve blown your arse off.’
‘That tiny thing?’
‘The pressure is higher inside a toilet bowl. It’s like squeezing a firecracker in your hand when it goes off. Basically, when you sit down to take a shit, your arse forms a seal over the hole, creating the perfect conditions for this bomb to do maximum damage.’
‘Are you saying it could have killed me?’
‘Ever seen anyone survive without an arse?’"
he gets caught up in a world of memorably eccentric characters and complicated plots. The chief suspect for the toilet bomb for example "was working at a convenience store. After greeting customers with an overly loud ‘Welcome!’ she hit them with a bubbly ‘Help you find something?’ or butted in with a nosy ‘Ooh, I buy these biscuits too!’ Most customers ignored her. But she laughed anyway, indifferent, and kept tossing jokes at them while clacking away at the register, picking up items from the counter with an exaggerated sweep of her arm. When there were no customers, she chattered nonstop on the shop telephone, or cleaned the shelves and reorganised the already perfectly arranged items. Chatting or cleaning , cleaning or chatting. She looked like a child with an attention-deficit disorder."
And at one point he finds himself wondering what he has got involved in:
"Plotter, cross-eyed librarian, knitting-shop owner— what on earth were these three mismatched women doing together? And in this ridiculous shop, of all places, watched over by Papa Smurf and Winnie-the-Pooh and all the Teletubbies?"
Kim is very effective at creating these memorable characters, although one criticism would be that he doesn't always follow through or suggest any deeper significance. For example, Old Raccoon runs his business out of a library:
"he found it hard to believe that this quiet place had headquartered a den of assassins for the last ninety years. He marvelled at the thought that all those deaths, all those assassinations and unexplained disappearances and faked accidents and imprisonments and kidnappings, had been decided and plotted right here in this building. Who’d chosen this place from which to orchestrate such abominable acts? It was madness. It would have made more sense to set up camp in the office of the National Dry Cleaners Union, or the office of the Organising Committee to Revitalise Poultry Farming."
And Old Raccoon has a one-book-in, one-book-out policy to stocking his shelves that very much reflects my own:
"Old Raccoon used to order new books regularly, but would throw out the same number just as regularly ... When their time came, Old Raccoon placed a black strip around the discards. It was his own special form of sentencing, a funeral procedure for books that had reached the end of their life. The same way ageing assassins were added to a list and eliminated by cleaners when their time came. Of course, a book’s life span was determined by Old Raccoon alone, and neither Reseng nor the librarians could understand why certain books had to be tossed. The books with black bands were gathered by the librarian and stacked in the courtyard to be burned on Sunday afternoons, the librarian’s day off. Old Raccoon could have sold them to a secondhand bookshop or even to a recycler, but he insisted on burning them."
Old Raccoon himself only read two of the books, alternating between an English and German encyclopedia, but, to his horror (as per the opening quote) Reseng teaches himself as a child to read, and becomes an avid bibliophile:
"The cabinet under the sink was stacked with instant noodle cups, and next to his pillow and on the table were the books that he’d either brought with him from Seoul or bought at the local bookshop : Albert Camus’ Summer and The Plague, Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, Martin Monestier’s Suicides, Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon."
which is all wonderful colour - but doesn't then seem of any great significance in the later plot or character development.
Nevertheless, an atmospheric and enjoyable read, rather too quirky to count as noir.
As for a rating - a tricky one. For personal appreciation, given my literary tastes, 3 stars but as a recommendation for other, particularly those seeking an alternative to Stieg Larrson clones, a solid 4.
Thanks to the publisher's via Netgalley for the ARC.
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
진짜 무슨 자신감으로 이 병신같은 쓰레글을 400페이지까지 썼지 양심도 없냐
개저씨들 제발 능력없으면 그냥 닥쳐주세요
개저씨들 제발 능력없으면 그냥 닥쳐주세요
dark
tense
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I didn't get really into this until the second half. I think it's just the narrative arc is different than I'm used to. I'd love to read another book set in this universe.