While the framework of the novel isn’t always tidy, the book is no less a significant representation of the politics of postwar hope and despair.Įngrossing. Wuertz’s book blooms in unexpected ways, eschewing a straightforward plot for more meandering paths. At the bank, she’s left with “an eerie feeling like stealing from a ghost, a fictional character with her name and identification number.” Jisun isn’t the only ghost walking in the pages of this book, which collects and mourns the forgotten, downtrodden souls these four must rescue or leap over in their race to the top. To outsmart her controlling father, she chooses to give away her fortune to the legal funds of protesters.
Even spirited Jisun must negotiate for her freedom. Namin is forced to choose between caretaking for her beloved disabled brother and raising her sister’s illegitimate son, while Sunam struggles with a bribe of unimaginable magnitude. With deep sympathy and psychological insight, she demonstrates how a corrupt political regime bankrupts-literally and figuratively-the choices of her characters, pushing them to moral extremes. Wuertz investigates a national crisis surrounding worker exploitation and upward mobility, the complicity of the rich, and the stifling indecision of the middle class.
It’s no accident that the book opens-and closes-amid the clamor of protest, from striking textile workers roughed into police vans to a smoke bomb planted during a college graduation ceremony. There’s Jisun, a revolutionary at heart fighting for autonomy from her wealthy and influential father Namin, a poor scholarship student struggling to bury her family’s past and lift them out of poverty Sunam, a striver caught between the different futures these young women offer him and Juno, an ingratiating social climber only interested in his own advancement. In her first novel, Wuertz traces the ambitions of four loosely connected students attending Seoul National University in 1978. An ambitious debut about power and family in South Korea with rich character portraits and a strong political heartbeat.
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