A review by lezreadalot
To the Warm Horizon by Jin-Young Choi

4.0

I’m going to survive very quietly. I’ll protect good things until I die.

Oooof. This was very bleak, but it has to be one of my favourite pieces of translated fiction I've ever consumed, just in terms of the writing. The plot concerns a near future dystopia, where the world has fallen to pieces after a global pandemic (this was written in 2017; yikes!) Everything is anarchy, and we're following various characters as they flee Korea and travel around Europe and try to survive. I don't think this is spectacularly written or anything (in fact, it has quite a lot of my formatting nitpicks and I'm surprised I was able to even read it) but something about the way the author phrased certain ideas or came at a concept very simply would often really get to me. In some ways, you could tell it was translated, because things would sometimes be phrased in a really specific way that I've never seen before? And idk, I love stuff like that.

Fearing separation, we embraced to become one, as if to show each other our bare hearts, as if to check what this was before naming it. As if sharing each other in this way was our only hope brushing past us.

The narrative is very disjointed; you don't get a very concrete sense of time, and we jump from different POVs without any real order to it. That did fit the mood though, with all the chaos and the pain. There's a really wonderful f/f love story in here, and I'm also weak for narratives about finding love in bleak situations. So many horrible things happened, and it was written about so starkly, but Dori and Jina's story really touched me. I also adored the sisterly bonds in here, as well as Ryu ruminating about her life as a wife and mother. So many great little gems of writing contained in this little book. (Also, now I'm super curious to read 'Annam'.) I'm glad I'm in a place now where I can read this kind of dark pandemic fiction; this was pretty special. Kudos to the translation for keeping the nuance of what I'm sure was already a very skilfully written book in the original Korean. I don't know if I can really recommend this for the plot (the timeline and the way things fell out didn't seem the most plausible) but I just really liked the writing.

Content warnings:

Spoiler

multiple instances of rape, attempted rape, murder, violence, gore

What could I ask of Joy in my dying moment? I love you. I will ask her to look after love.