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Loading... I Have the Right to Destroy Myselfby Young-Ha Kim
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This was horrible. It was one of those artsy books with no plot, and all the characters did was have sex and kill themselves. If that's what South Korea considers literature, I'll pass. ( )a very dark read, and fairly confusing to boot. This was a short sparsely written book. The narrator finds people who seem to have an inclination towards suicide and helps them accomplish the task. I kept wondering if this person was an assistant to the Grim Reaper himself. The story was told around the lives of brothers C and K. They meet strange, hopeless, attractive young women who eventually kill themselves. Sex is compulsive and void of any real passion. It was an easy read and very compelling. Discussions of art and the business of capturing images - do we do this out of fear of the blank canvas, or to hide behind. All in all, not very uplifting stuff. This novella is a deftly written foray into a person's decision to end their life... and an "assistant" who assists with that decision. I thought the author did an impressive job of examining the differing perspectives of people whose lives are all, in some way, intertwined. He managed to both set apart the differences of the characters into separate tales, and then knead their similarities back again into a single story. I've had limited exposure to Korean literature, but if this is a fair representation, I can't wait to read more! no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0156030802, Paperback)In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same woman—Se-yeon—who tears at both of them as they all try desperately to find real connection in an atomized world. A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the edges of their lives as he tells of his work helping the lost and hurting find escape through suicide. Dreamlike and beautiful, the South Korea brought forth in this novel is cinematic in its urgency and its reflection of contemporary life everywhere—far beyond the boundaries of the Korean peninsula. Recalling the emotional tension of Milan Kundera and the existential anguish of Bret Easton Ellis, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself achieves its author’s greatest wish—to show Korean literature as part of an international tradition. Young-ha Kim is a young master, the leading literary voice of his generation. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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