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A review by ninetalevixen
City of Ash and Red by Pyun Hye-young
1.0
I received a free copy of this book through Edelweiss for review purposes. This does not affect my rating or opinions.
1.5 stars.Definitely not because that's the only rating I haven't given out yet this year and I want to even out my book stats bar graph.
Honestly, I never meant to finish this book - but I kept finding myself thinking, Oh, I'll stop after I finish this chapter, just in case something exciting happens, and nothing exciting would happen but for some reason I would keep reading? So I guess it gets an extra half star for making me do that, though I hated the ending. Hated. That's not a word I use lightly: I'm okay with ambiguous/open endings, I'm okay with closure, but I hate when we get neither and the book just ... stops.
I couldn't connect with the main character at all, possibly partly because he was "the man" throughout and never got a name. I have a history of staying emotionally remote from unnamed protagonists; I suspect it's not the namelessness itself but the writing style that often accompanies such a choice: denser, with a lot of figurative language that may not make sense (ravens compared to black fruit in a tree, an apartment building "waiting patiently like a huge dog"), and arbitrary or just really poor decisions being made.
There was a flicker of interest when linguistics came up, because language learning and linguistic theory are really interesting to me, but the discussions in this book didn't feel nuanced enough - just constant incidents in which the man couldn't understand what the people around him were saying, or super-convenient double meanings for certain phrases, or recurrence of the name "Mol."
And there's a lot of objectionable content in this book, which didn't really do anything for me except make me extremely uncomfortable. There's a blunt (if clinical) rape scene - the word "rape" is used several times by the perpetrator, but he feels no remorse and even blames the victim, his wife, for provoking him; there's violence and murder towards rats and other people; and there's just a lot of general grossness with the trash piled everywhere in District 4 and the lack of hygiene among the homeless and the graphic violence.
I can vaguely see the literary value in this kind of book, but it's definitely not my type of read.
1.5 stars.
Honestly, I never meant to finish this book - but I kept finding myself thinking, Oh, I'll stop after I finish this chapter, just in case something exciting happens, and nothing exciting would happen but for some reason I would keep reading? So I guess it gets an extra half star for making me do that, though I hated the ending. Hated. That's not a word I use lightly: I'm okay with ambiguous/open endings, I'm okay with closure, but I hate when we get neither and the book just ... stops.
I couldn't connect with the main character at all, possibly partly because he was "the man" throughout and never got a name. I have a history of staying emotionally remote from unnamed protagonists; I suspect it's not the namelessness itself but the writing style that often accompanies such a choice: denser, with a lot of figurative language that may not make sense (ravens compared to black fruit in a tree, an apartment building "waiting patiently like a huge dog"), and arbitrary or just really poor decisions being made.
There was a flicker of interest when linguistics came up, because language learning and linguistic theory are really interesting to me, but the discussions in this book didn't feel nuanced enough - just constant incidents in which the man couldn't understand what the people around him were saying, or super-convenient double meanings for certain phrases, or recurrence of the name "Mol."
And there's a lot of objectionable content in this book, which didn't really do anything for me except make me extremely uncomfortable. There's a blunt (if clinical) rape scene - the word "rape" is used several times by the perpetrator, but he feels no remorse and even blames the victim, his wife, for provoking him; there's violence and murder towards rats and other people; and there's just a lot of general grossness with the trash piled everywhere in District 4 and the lack of hygiene among the homeless and the graphic violence.
I can vaguely see the literary value in this kind of book, but it's definitely not my type of read.