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A review by goldenfenris
The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart by Chesil
3.0
I was initially really excited to pick this up because it has been compared to both Pachinko and Go, two books that I really loved. I guess you could say that my expectations were probably too high because of this, but from the very beginning I didn’t really love the writing style of this book. It’s hard to say if the simple writing is the same in Japanese, but I never found myself getting into a proper cadence with it. Since, Takami Nieda also translated Go, I think it has more to do with the original than the translation. However, I also never felt fully emotionally invested in the characters.
Aside from Ginny, basically all the characters are one-dimensional and lacked anything to make me feel anything. Don’t get me wrong, I think that racism is wrong and that alone makes me feel something, but that is my own morals and has nothing to do with the writing skill of the author or her ability to tell a story.
I know that this is semi-autobiographical and I always feel a bit weird rating stories like this. I feel like I’m passing judgement on their life, which I’m not. I’m passing judgement on their writing. Well, usually, I can think of one autobiography where I was judging life choices, but that’s not this case for this one. For this book, I just mostly felt disconnected from everything.
As I’m not a complete stranger to the zainichi, I didn’t really need a basic primer as to what that means, but some readers may need more than this book provides. I was looking for some sort of internal struggle between her heritage and the country of her birth, which I didn’t really get. Ginny can hardly speak any Korean at the beginning of this novel, so to say that she’s struggling with any inherited alliance to Korea is not a thing.
Overall, I guess I would recommend this for readers looking for something semi-autobiographical about the zainichi. The only reason I made it past the 20% mark was sheer determination and the fact that it is so short. I’m not particularly inclined to pick up anything by Chesil in the future, but I would pick up something else translated by Takami Nieda.
Aside from Ginny, basically all the characters are one-dimensional and lacked anything to make me feel anything. Don’t get me wrong, I think that racism is wrong and that alone makes me feel something, but that is my own morals and has nothing to do with the writing skill of the author or her ability to tell a story.
I know that this is semi-autobiographical and I always feel a bit weird rating stories like this. I feel like I’m passing judgement on their life, which I’m not. I’m passing judgement on their writing. Well, usually, I can think of one autobiography where I was judging life choices, but that’s not this case for this one. For this book, I just mostly felt disconnected from everything.
As I’m not a complete stranger to the zainichi, I didn’t really need a basic primer as to what that means, but some readers may need more than this book provides. I was looking for some sort of internal struggle between her heritage and the country of her birth, which I didn’t really get. Ginny can hardly speak any Korean at the beginning of this novel, so to say that she’s struggling with any inherited alliance to Korea is not a thing.
Overall, I guess I would recommend this for readers looking for something semi-autobiographical about the zainichi. The only reason I made it past the 20% mark was sheer determination and the fact that it is so short. I’m not particularly inclined to pick up anything by Chesil in the future, but I would pick up something else translated by Takami Nieda.