The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness

July 15, 2015
A successful yet troubled South Korean writer looks back on her teenage years and her struggle to work, learn, and survive during "solitary days lived inside an industrial labor genre painting." Drawn in part from its author's own experiences, this novel by prizewinner Shin (I'll Be Right There, 2014, etc.) takes an unsparing look at the near-Victorian working and living conditions suffered in her country during the late 1970s. The unnamed narrator leaves her rural home at age 16 to take a job in an electronics factory in Seoul, where efforts to unionize are resisted by the company at every turn. Her living accommodation is "a lone room" (one of several incantatory phrases in the book), badly heated and ventilated, and shared with several other family members. Money is tight, food is scarce, and the only way to get ahead is to study at night after a full day on the production line. Shin's unemotional delivery and understated yet devastating perspective on her country's expectations and norms are familiar from her earlier novels, but this book's grim glimpse into the lives of factory girls is notably haunting. The narrator is fortunate: she is encouraged by some kind figures, including a teacher who gives her a novel and urges her to write, and she clings to her dream of creativity. Now, however, looking back 16 years later, famous and materially comfortable in a transformed society, the narrator still feels that the wounds of her youth are unhealed, notably those caused by the tragic death of a friend, which "turned me into an infinite blank." Yet the act of writing this book and the poetic final fugue suggest release and restoration are possible. There's a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age story described as "not quite fact and not quite fiction." Allusive and structurally sophisticated, it melds Shin's characteristic themes of politics, literature, and painful experience into a mysteriously compelling whole.

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September 15, 2015
A writer struggles with revisiting her teenage years working in a Seoul factory in the latest novel by the author of Please Look after Mom (2011). The narratorwho describes the recounting as not quite fact and not quite fiction, but something in between is, at 32, a literary success. Now, for the first time, she's laying bare the struggles of her youth when, at 16, she left the farm she'd grown up on and, with her cousin, journeyed to Seoul to live in a tiny apartment with her oldest brother. She and her cousin work in a factory so that they can attend the city's industrial high school. The girls are quickly caught in the middle of the struggle between the factory's administration and the fledgling union, which the administration tries to stamp out by withholding wages and firing members. Shin's book not only vividly evokes the political unrest and fraught city life in 1970s Seoul but also deftly explores the struggles of a writer attempting to come to terms with her past through her work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 15, 2015

Credited with revitalizing Korea's publishing industry, Shin's 2011 Please Look After Mom (the author's debut in English) made this international powerhouse the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her latest, arriving stateside 20 years after its Korean publication, is part memoir, part portrait-of-an-artist-as-a-teenager, and part writing treatise. Shin is the eponymous girl at 16, sent from her village to live in a "lone room" in Seoul with her oldest brother and cousin to work tedious hours in an electronics factory for the opportunity to attend high school at night. Korea in 1978 is an economically and politically unstable country whose youth will pay the highest price for the phenomenal success to come. Sixteen years later, Shin's an established writer, contacted by a former classmate: "You don't write about us.... Could it be you're ashamed?" The years of elision yield to fraught memories: her reclamation of her own name and age, her tenuous relationships, the teacher who gifted her with a book and the belief she could be the novelist she would become. VERDICT This work stands the test of time. Isolation and suicide among young adults worldwide have only tragically multiplied, making Girl urgently auspicious. Described at beginning and end as "not quite fact and not quite fiction," this book is essential reading.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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