What do you think?
Rate this book
Violets
We join San in 1970s rural South Korea, a young girl ostracised from her community. She meets a girl called Namae, and they become friends until one afternoon changes everything. Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation.
We next meet San, aged twenty-two, as she starts a job in a flower shop. There, we are introduced to a colourful cast of characters, including the shop's mute owner, the other florist Su-ae, and the customers that include a sexually aggressive businessman and a photographer, who San develops an obsession for. Throughout, San's moment with Namae lingers in the back of her mind.
A story of desire and violence about a young woman who everyone forgot, VIOLETS is a captivating and sensual read, full of tragedy and beauty.
We next meet San, aged twenty-two, as she starts a job in a flower shop. There, we are introduced to a colourful cast of characters, including the shop's mute owner, the other florist Su-ae, and the customers that include a sexually aggressive businessman and a photographer, who San develops an obsession for. Throughout, San's moment with Namae lingers in the back of her mind.
A story of desire and violence about a young woman who everyone forgot, VIOLETS is a captivating and sensual read, full of tragedy and beauty.
218 pages, Paperback
First published August 9, 2001
300 people are currently reading
21648 people want to read
About the author
Kyung-Sook Shin
29 books1,559 followersAssociated Names:
* Shin Kyung-sook
* 신경숙
* 申京淑
Kyung-Sook Shin is a South Korean writer. She is the first South Korean and first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 for 'Please Look After Mom'.
* Shin Kyung-sook
* 신경숙
* 申京淑
Kyung-Sook Shin is a South Korean writer. She is the first South Korean and first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 for 'Please Look After Mom'.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 734 reviews
![Profile Image for s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all].](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fusers%2F1735525095i%2F6431467._UX200_CR0%2C11%2C200%2C200_.jpg&w=128&q=75)
March 16, 2024
‘I wonder: Is this your first time hearing this cry? This cry, which for centuries was never given an ear, or a means to be heard?’
Midway through Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets (바이올렛), Oh San looks up the definition of the titular flower and observes the words around it:
Violator: Noun, one who breaks rules, invades, insults, rapes
Violence: Noun, a disturbance, disruption, destruction
Violet: Noun, a plant, a swallow flower … purple, the color, also used to describe … an oversensitive person, a shy person (“shrinking violet”)
Violin: Noun, a musical instrument … a player of, a violinist
Each of these will in turn appear and inform Shin’s bruising novel of repressed (queer) desires, loneliness, and absense of self-confidence that comes mixed in both sentimentality and violence. Originally released in 2001 in South Korea, it is now gorgeously translated into English by the expert mind of Anton Hur (I will read anything they work on) and is a necessary voice about those who lack a voice and are overlooked in society.
‘Taking care of the plants might be a kind of consolation for her sinking heart, for the feeling that she’s losing out on her dreams.’
‘There are women all around us who exist in silence, anonymous and without anything special about them; she could be me and she could be you,’ writes Kyung-Sook Shin in her afterword, stating her goal in the novel was ‘to amplify the voices of those women, whom no one could hear unless one were listening very carefully, to let them speak through my words.’ In this way, Oh San becomes a metaphor embodied in the narrative of her summer in Seoul where, after finding professional mobility blocked at every turn, she takes a job at a cozy flower shop and becomes fast friends and roommates with Su-ae, the owner’s niece. Yet the calmness of their friendship and the therapeutic nature of their work begins to erode as San’s struggles with intimacy fester and an unexpected obsession with a photographer who pays her a compliment dredges up buried trauma as Shin’s message of women silenced, abused and not given space becomes more concrete. Violets feels adjacent to many of the ideas expressed in Mieko Kawakami novels (and perhaps also Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982), both authors delivering books of quiet beauty with dark edges on issues of feminism and misogyny, and Shin’s message spirals the reader into a dark hellscape of society where the world seems increasingly threatening.
‘If you love things too much, they die’
The novel opens in the rural South Korea of the 1970’s with the simple opening line ‘A little girl.’ Which is what Shin wants us to keep in mind, even when San is in her 20s throughout most of the novel after the heartbreaking first chapter, that inside she is a little girl, innocent, deserving of love but quickly became ‘an uncelebrated girl,’ unwanted from birth from her father and living a childhood that leads to intimacy issues. Her father is unique in their community, working in a factory and driving a motorcycle instead of farming like the rest of the townspeople as well as divorcing his wife, all representing the shift to modernism and the loss of traditional values that is a central theme to Shin’s later novel Please Look After Mother. Her mother moves from man to man, having little mobility as a woman and even less status as a divorced one, leaving San alone until eventually disappearing forever. Her only friend, Namae, is a girl also lacking a parent and their friendship is a balm against their outcast status amongst their peers. After a sapphic encounter, San is rejected and scorned by Namae. ‘I will love you more than myself,’ she had said, and without Namae to love, rejected and forgotten, what love is there for herself.
‘So I decided to exact my revenge. By ruining my life.’
San and Su-ae have an instant connection, Su-ae with a louder, more forceful personality that allows San to float along beside in her quietness. The two share a similar outlook on life, both having experienced loss at a young age and Su-ae takes her mother’s death hard, saying ‘I did not want to give her the satisfaction of seeing me live a good life. I wanted to ruin what life I had left.’ This shakes San, who begins to see her troubles with intimacy and loneliness mutate into reckless behavior and the closeness with her friend triggers her repressed trauma that returns as ‘a fresh green sadness’ and she begins to slowly push herself away.
When the photographer gives her a compliment over drinks, she falls into an obsession, even imagining him possessing her body from the inside like a demon and seeing or hearing him everywhere she goes as she begins to spiral. ‘San’s attraction did not originate this summer,’ Shin writes, ‘but rather, it has lain in wait for millennia before bursting forth all at once.’ She retreats into isolation and finds that she has no ability to respond to the world around her. She has desires but her fear of intimacy make her freeze up, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of rejection. Her old coping methods fall apart and ‘this free fall for a man she didn’t even know inflamed old, anxious feelings, which had previously been dulled and mitigated by tending the plants.’
Caring for plants became a sort of therapy in the early stages of the novel, something San is able to control. The plants are helpless and the store becomes a little haven, as does the flower farm (which is very juxtaposed to the city filled with imagery of destruction).
It is peaceful and for a time keeps her mental health in check. San is drawn to those who are damaged or outcast or hurt, like Namae and Su-ae, but also frequently cares for animals and plants, such as feeding the caged dog or feeling a kinship with the cat with big scars, as if her comfort towards them is the comfort she was denied when she needed it. Her fascination with the carnivorous plant, however, portents the dark trajectory she is embarking on. ‘She said looking at them made her think she wanted to live. Something about the plants growing in wastelands but being so beautiful.’
Once San begins to spiral, with repeated events of violence such as the suicide of a neighbor or a near-kidnapping/sexual assault by a police officer, the world beings to be perceived as surreal and threatening. It slowly creeps in, especially in the violent city where an excavator sits threateningly over a hole in the earth ‘ready to destroy all and everything’ as a symbol of ‘staunch and immovable violence.’ Eventually the natural world becomes hostile, ‘the rice is ready to lunge at her,’ ‘chrysanthemums scream at her,’ ‘the very trees and grasses harbor animosity,’ and even ‘the plants, that had always felt friendly, now feel…as if they’re piercing her every time she touches them.’ Earlier in the novel we see the flower farm is seen as a retreat from the harshness of the world, but as her mental health declines even a haven no longer seems to be able to reach her.
In fact, we see San become more and more like the dual definitions of violets, embodying both the flower and the ‘oversensitive person, a shy person (“shrinking violet”)’ both in her behavior and appearance.
Violets are a fitting metaphor in this book, particularly as they are sometimes called the Eyes of Io, from the Greek Myth of Io, a woman transformed into a cow by Zeus to hide her from Hera, as explained in the novel as another example of women being at the whims or victims to men’s wills. When San first meets the photographer, he detests the violets he has been sent to photograph. ‘What’s so pretty about these flowers? Such nonsense,’ he says, and the narrator discusses how they are so small and fragile they are often overlooked. Just like women in society, if you haven’t caught the metaphor yet. Throughout we see San as a stand-in for all women, feeling guilty if she refuses someone, feeling any man’s disappointment as if she should be ashamed. It is best exemplified by this exchange in a bar:
‘Well, men just say whatever they want; what stopped you then?” She barely understands what she means herself.
One of the men asks, “So you’re saying women can’t?”
She replies, “Well, women, the thing about women is …” But her face is completely red and she bows her head.’
She self-silences in fear of having upset a man’s calm or in fear of calling him out, proving her own point in her silence about the double standards in society.
‘The sandcastle she built has crumbled in the face of his careless words.’
The novel heads in a fairly predictable direction, but one like witnessing a crash course take shape where you can’t tear your gaze away as the horror unfolds. A woman’s safety is seen as wholly at the mercy of men’s whims—even one who seems safe—and women’s agency comes across as an illusion once a man decides they want something. It is terrifying and society needs to do better, and we see San’s inability to convey her feelings become the trap that ensnares her in a man’s willful misreading of her intentions for his own purposes. Even a powerful scene of unleashed rage and defiance is dulled off as futility, with Shin making a bold statement on women’s plight in a patriarchal society.
‘At the end of that soft joy, this pain …’
Violets is a bleak but insightful novel sustained by gorgeous writing saturated with tone and underlying dread that keeps the relatively slow pace moving along and engaging. Anton Hur performs translation mastery as usual and this book’s symbolism-heavy themes radiate in fluid and seemingly effortless poetic language. The narration style is interesting and dynamic, too, often overpowering San’s inner world and interjecting directly to the reader as if to push her aside as another example of women being cast off and overlooked. Kyung-Sook Shin has a message for us and Violets delivers.
4/5
‘I want to hide my pain from the flowers. I don’t want to tell them of life’s suffering. Because if they know my sadness, the flowers will cry too.’
- Buena Vista Social Club ’
Midway through Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets (바이올렛), Oh San looks up the definition of the titular flower and observes the words around it:
Violator: Noun, one who breaks rules, invades, insults, rapes
Violence: Noun, a disturbance, disruption, destruction
Violet: Noun, a plant, a swallow flower … purple, the color, also used to describe … an oversensitive person, a shy person (“shrinking violet”)
Violin: Noun, a musical instrument … a player of, a violinist
Each of these will in turn appear and inform Shin’s bruising novel of repressed (queer) desires, loneliness, and absense of self-confidence that comes mixed in both sentimentality and violence. Originally released in 2001 in South Korea, it is now gorgeously translated into English by the expert mind of Anton Hur (I will read anything they work on) and is a necessary voice about those who lack a voice and are overlooked in society.
‘Taking care of the plants might be a kind of consolation for her sinking heart, for the feeling that she’s losing out on her dreams.’
‘There are women all around us who exist in silence, anonymous and without anything special about them; she could be me and she could be you,’ writes Kyung-Sook Shin in her afterword, stating her goal in the novel was ‘to amplify the voices of those women, whom no one could hear unless one were listening very carefully, to let them speak through my words.’ In this way, Oh San becomes a metaphor embodied in the narrative of her summer in Seoul where, after finding professional mobility blocked at every turn, she takes a job at a cozy flower shop and becomes fast friends and roommates with Su-ae, the owner’s niece. Yet the calmness of their friendship and the therapeutic nature of their work begins to erode as San’s struggles with intimacy fester and an unexpected obsession with a photographer who pays her a compliment dredges up buried trauma as Shin’s message of women silenced, abused and not given space becomes more concrete. Violets feels adjacent to many of the ideas expressed in Mieko Kawakami novels (and perhaps also Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982), both authors delivering books of quiet beauty with dark edges on issues of feminism and misogyny, and Shin’s message spirals the reader into a dark hellscape of society where the world seems increasingly threatening.
‘If you love things too much, they die’
The novel opens in the rural South Korea of the 1970’s with the simple opening line ‘A little girl.’ Which is what Shin wants us to keep in mind, even when San is in her 20s throughout most of the novel after the heartbreaking first chapter, that inside she is a little girl, innocent, deserving of love but quickly became ‘an uncelebrated girl,’ unwanted from birth from her father and living a childhood that leads to intimacy issues. Her father is unique in their community, working in a factory and driving a motorcycle instead of farming like the rest of the townspeople as well as divorcing his wife, all representing the shift to modernism and the loss of traditional values that is a central theme to Shin’s later novel Please Look After Mother. Her mother moves from man to man, having little mobility as a woman and even less status as a divorced one, leaving San alone until eventually disappearing forever. Her only friend, Namae, is a girl also lacking a parent and their friendship is a balm against their outcast status amongst their peers. After a sapphic encounter, San is rejected and scorned by Namae. ‘I will love you more than myself,’ she had said, and without Namae to love, rejected and forgotten, what love is there for herself.
‘So I decided to exact my revenge. By ruining my life.’
San and Su-ae have an instant connection, Su-ae with a louder, more forceful personality that allows San to float along beside in her quietness. The two share a similar outlook on life, both having experienced loss at a young age and Su-ae takes her mother’s death hard, saying ‘I did not want to give her the satisfaction of seeing me live a good life. I wanted to ruin what life I had left.’ This shakes San, who begins to see her troubles with intimacy and loneliness mutate into reckless behavior and the closeness with her friend triggers her repressed trauma that returns as ‘a fresh green sadness’ and she begins to slowly push herself away.
When the photographer gives her a compliment over drinks, she falls into an obsession, even imagining him possessing her body from the inside like a demon and seeing or hearing him everywhere she goes as she begins to spiral. ‘San’s attraction did not originate this summer,’ Shin writes, ‘but rather, it has lain in wait for millennia before bursting forth all at once.’ She retreats into isolation and finds that she has no ability to respond to the world around her. She has desires but her fear of intimacy make her freeze up, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of rejection. Her old coping methods fall apart and ‘this free fall for a man she didn’t even know inflamed old, anxious feelings, which had previously been dulled and mitigated by tending the plants.’
Caring for plants became a sort of therapy in the early stages of the novel, something San is able to control. The plants are helpless and the store becomes a little haven, as does the flower farm (which is very juxtaposed to the city filled with imagery of destruction).
’The flower shop in the early summer is verdant and radiant. The windows, even the outer shutters, are opened to the street. The sidewalk in front of the shop is wet, as if someone has just sprinkled a hose there. Pots of ficus trees, rubber figs, and lady palms populate the sidewalk. When annoyed pedestrians walk by, their frowns melt into contented sighs at the sight of lush green plants, purple balloon flowers, and buckets filled with China pinks and irises.’
It is peaceful and for a time keeps her mental health in check. San is drawn to those who are damaged or outcast or hurt, like Namae and Su-ae, but also frequently cares for animals and plants, such as feeding the caged dog or feeling a kinship with the cat with big scars, as if her comfort towards them is the comfort she was denied when she needed it. Her fascination with the carnivorous plant, however, portents the dark trajectory she is embarking on. ‘She said looking at them made her think she wanted to live. Something about the plants growing in wastelands but being so beautiful.’
Once San begins to spiral, with repeated events of violence such as the suicide of a neighbor or a near-kidnapping/sexual assault by a police officer, the world beings to be perceived as surreal and threatening. It slowly creeps in, especially in the violent city where an excavator sits threateningly over a hole in the earth ‘ready to destroy all and everything’ as a symbol of ‘staunch and immovable violence.’ Eventually the natural world becomes hostile, ‘the rice is ready to lunge at her,’ ‘chrysanthemums scream at her,’ ‘the very trees and grasses harbor animosity,’ and even ‘the plants, that had always felt friendly, now feel…as if they’re piercing her every time she touches them.’ Earlier in the novel we see the flower farm is seen as a retreat from the harshness of the world, but as her mental health declines even a haven no longer seems to be able to reach her.
In fact, we see San become more and more like the dual definitions of violets, embodying both the flower and the ‘oversensitive person, a shy person (“shrinking violet”)’ both in her behavior and appearance.
’Her hair has been cut short. Despite rarely wearing makeup, she now sports violet eyeshadow and her cheeks have been rouged. She looks like a different person...she looks so fragile that a mere brush might send her toppling down.’
Violets are a fitting metaphor in this book, particularly as they are sometimes called the Eyes of Io, from the Greek Myth of Io, a woman transformed into a cow by Zeus to hide her from Hera, as explained in the novel as another example of women being at the whims or victims to men’s wills. When San first meets the photographer, he detests the violets he has been sent to photograph. ‘What’s so pretty about these flowers? Such nonsense,’ he says, and the narrator discusses how they are so small and fragile they are often overlooked. Just like women in society, if you haven’t caught the metaphor yet. Throughout we see San as a stand-in for all women, feeling guilty if she refuses someone, feeling any man’s disappointment as if she should be ashamed. It is best exemplified by this exchange in a bar:
‘Well, men just say whatever they want; what stopped you then?” She barely understands what she means herself.
One of the men asks, “So you’re saying women can’t?”
She replies, “Well, women, the thing about women is …” But her face is completely red and she bows her head.’
She self-silences in fear of having upset a man’s calm or in fear of calling him out, proving her own point in her silence about the double standards in society.
‘The sandcastle she built has crumbled in the face of his careless words.’
The novel heads in a fairly predictable direction, but one like witnessing a crash course take shape where you can’t tear your gaze away as the horror unfolds. A woman’s safety is seen as wholly at the mercy of men’s whims—even one who seems safe—and women’s agency comes across as an illusion once a man decides they want something. It is terrifying and society needs to do better, and we see San’s inability to convey her feelings become the trap that ensnares her in a man’s willful misreading of her intentions for his own purposes. Even a powerful scene of unleashed rage and defiance is dulled off as futility, with Shin making a bold statement on women’s plight in a patriarchal society.
‘At the end of that soft joy, this pain …’
Violets is a bleak but insightful novel sustained by gorgeous writing saturated with tone and underlying dread that keeps the relatively slow pace moving along and engaging. Anton Hur performs translation mastery as usual and this book’s symbolism-heavy themes radiate in fluid and seemingly effortless poetic language. The narration style is interesting and dynamic, too, often overpowering San’s inner world and interjecting directly to the reader as if to push her aside as another example of women being cast off and overlooked. Kyung-Sook Shin has a message for us and Violets delivers.
4/5
‘I want to hide my pain from the flowers. I don’t want to tell them of life’s suffering. Because if they know my sadness, the flowers will cry too.’
- Buena Vista Social Club ’
November 9, 2021
Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets is a soft-spoken, slow-burning piece that unexpectedly bursts out in a cacophony of despair. Shin tells the story of San who grows up on the edges of a small, rural community. Neglected by her mother, and rejected by her father for not being the longed-for son, San’s outsider status seems inevitable but then she meets Namae, and these “two nothing-girls” find solace in each other’s friendship. But when Namae rejects San’s tentative expressions of love, San finds herself even more isolated than before. She eventually ends up in Seoul where work in a flower shop alongside outgoing Su-ae provides temporary refuge, but San seems unwilling or unable to overcome her sense of loss and memories of Namae. Despite some awkward pacing and occasionally heavy-handed use of imagery, this is a compelling, beautifully-observed, exploration of a society characterised by relentless change - threatening to overwhelm its individual inhabitants. Against this backdrop Shin offers up a meditative, subtle yet intense, portrait of suppressed queer desire and urban isolation in which San’s experiences combine to form a chilling indictment of a culture that assigns little or no value to surplus women. She transforms the fragile San into a potent stand-in for the many women struggling to exist on the margins of a deeply hierarchical, patriarchal culture. Women it seems who’re negligible except perhaps for their potential as victims or prey for brutal men. Violets is one of Shin’s earlier books, first published in 2001 but now available in an English-language version thoughtfully rendered by renowned translator Anton Hur.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher The Feminist Press at CUNY for an arc
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher The Feminist Press at CUNY for an arc
December 22, 2024
'please picture me in the weeds before i learned civility I used to scream ferociously any time i wanted'
seven by Taylor Swift
Learning Korean has been one of the most fun and fulfilling experiences of my life, and though I’m not ready to read a whole book in that language, it has made me appreciate Korean Literature more, there is just something inexplicably poetic about it, that translate beautifully into English.
Korea is a country seeped on tradition, patriarchal tradition that is (as if there could be any other kind, right?) where having a daughter brings a family tragedy-adjacent despair "The mother knows what will happen now. An uncelebrated girl"
As I was reminded of The Vegetarian by Han Kang I thought about Michelle's wonderful review on it (which is written in Korean but I recommend translating it, it’s extremely insightful) and the word she used to describe Yeong-Hye fits perfectly for San. 비폭력 means nonviolence, but can also be translated to ahimsa (Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and principle of nonviolence and revering all living creatures and refraining from harming any living thing)
Female protagonists written by Asian female authors often have this trait and meet similar fates, which serves as great commentary on society. Stories like this one have been told many times, and will continue to be told. This book was first published in 2001, but it feels scarily set in the present which means that, sadly, not much has changed. "Does this story seem unfamiliar or extraordinary? It shouldn’t."
"Memory is an unannounced visitor. It lies crumpled in some corner of the body, then suddenly knocks on the door of reality and makes you scream"
Memories play a fundamental role in the story, because after San’s last encounter with Namae, her childhood friend who she experienced romantic feelings towards and saw as an equal, she leaps into a life of silence and regret. The feeling of being inherently flawed never leaves her again, which leads to insecurities and emptiness. There's so much symbolism and imagery that I'm sure I didn't get all of it, especially since I don't know much about plants, but I loved the minari field as a projection of San and Namae’s relationship: after returning so many years later, the field is gone, and everything that happened lives only in San’s fragile mind.
When she meets Su-ae she is inmediatelly fascinated, she represent everything San is not "Su-ae’s strength feels magical. Su-ae knows how to say, in a very clear voice: No. I don’t think so." but somehow they’re still the same, with Su-ae even comparing them to two papaya palms growing in the farm, side by side, as friends. Su-ae gives San the stability she needed in her life, and for a moment San was contempt, that until she met the photographer.
I feel I might have interpret San's relationship with the photographer wrong, by projecting my own experiences into it, because it's never clearly understood how she feels about him, yes, she becomes obsessed with him, and the word 'desire' is what the author uses to describe her feelings towards him but what I interpreted was that she felt disrupted. Men often think they have every right to make comments like “Look, I have something to say. I’m not the kind of guy who says things like this but if I’m being honest, do you have any idea how fast my heart was beating when I saw you the first time with those damn violets" and women have to take it in gracefully and be thankful that such attention is being placed on them. I felt she became riveted with how he was allowed to make such a statement without a second-guess, without feeling the shame she had felt every single day since her feelings were dismissed so cruelly when she was a child.
"No matter what happens there, it will only be scenery"
San’s withdrawal from the world that constantly attacks her makes her disoriented and emotionless, the more she sinks into herself the quieter and detached she appears. At the beginning of the novel she talks about the desire to crash into something, which kind of serves as a prophecy for the end, but even when she is the one exerting violence, she’s the only one getting hurt.
"No one seems to take note of the loneliness she carries. Just some woman in the crowd"
seven by Taylor Swift
Learning Korean has been one of the most fun and fulfilling experiences of my life, and though I’m not ready to read a whole book in that language, it has made me appreciate Korean Literature more, there is just something inexplicably poetic about it, that translate beautifully into English.
Korea is a country seeped on tradition, patriarchal tradition that is (as if there could be any other kind, right?) where having a daughter brings a family tragedy-adjacent despair "The mother knows what will happen now. An uncelebrated girl"
As I was reminded of The Vegetarian by Han Kang I thought about Michelle's wonderful review on it (which is written in Korean but I recommend translating it, it’s extremely insightful) and the word she used to describe Yeong-Hye fits perfectly for San. 비폭력 means nonviolence, but can also be translated to ahimsa (Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and principle of nonviolence and revering all living creatures and refraining from harming any living thing)
Female protagonists written by Asian female authors often have this trait and meet similar fates, which serves as great commentary on society. Stories like this one have been told many times, and will continue to be told. This book was first published in 2001, but it feels scarily set in the present which means that, sadly, not much has changed. "Does this story seem unfamiliar or extraordinary? It shouldn’t."
"Memory is an unannounced visitor. It lies crumpled in some corner of the body, then suddenly knocks on the door of reality and makes you scream"
Memories play a fundamental role in the story, because after San’s last encounter with Namae, her childhood friend who she experienced romantic feelings towards and saw as an equal, she leaps into a life of silence and regret. The feeling of being inherently flawed never leaves her again, which leads to insecurities and emptiness. There's so much symbolism and imagery that I'm sure I didn't get all of it, especially since I don't know much about plants, but I loved the minari field as a projection of San and Namae’s relationship: after returning so many years later, the field is gone, and everything that happened lives only in San’s fragile mind.
When she meets Su-ae she is inmediatelly fascinated, she represent everything San is not "Su-ae’s strength feels magical. Su-ae knows how to say, in a very clear voice: No. I don’t think so." but somehow they’re still the same, with Su-ae even comparing them to two papaya palms growing in the farm, side by side, as friends. Su-ae gives San the stability she needed in her life, and for a moment San was contempt, that until she met the photographer.
I feel I might have interpret San's relationship with the photographer wrong, by projecting my own experiences into it, because it's never clearly understood how she feels about him, yes, she becomes obsessed with him, and the word 'desire' is what the author uses to describe her feelings towards him but what I interpreted was that she felt disrupted. Men often think they have every right to make comments like “Look, I have something to say. I’m not the kind of guy who says things like this but if I’m being honest, do you have any idea how fast my heart was beating when I saw you the first time with those damn violets" and women have to take it in gracefully and be thankful that such attention is being placed on them. I felt she became riveted with how he was allowed to make such a statement without a second-guess, without feeling the shame she had felt every single day since her feelings were dismissed so cruelly when she was a child.
"No matter what happens there, it will only be scenery"
San’s withdrawal from the world that constantly attacks her makes her disoriented and emotionless, the more she sinks into herself the quieter and detached she appears. At the beginning of the novel she talks about the desire to crash into something, which kind of serves as a prophecy for the end, but even when she is the one exerting violence, she’s the only one getting hurt.
"No one seems to take note of the loneliness she carries. Just some woman in the crowd"
April 13, 2022
Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded down...then back up...then back down again....
I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: This translation from the Korean joins a widening stream of Korean-culture transplants...Squid Game, Minari, this author's previously translated novel Please Look After Mom ...making their roots into American pop-cultural soil.
If you've yet to explore the trickle, start now before it's a flood. I think it's wonderful because English-language monoglot culture gets stale and boring and all alike if we don't seek out fresh infusions of talent and stories. And, like all the best translations, this story's timelessness is rendered in prose that could very easily have been first created in English...none of the occasional signals of awkwardly trying to explicate something that one word in the translated language would convey whole and entire. That is a fine achievement indeed, probably helped along by the fact that things like "minari" aren't quite as furrin as they would've been in 2011, when Please Look After Mom was published.
What happens in this story is not particularly new or unusual. A girl is born to unfit parents:
Thus does another unwanted girl enter the world that won't ever bother to see her, really even to look at her. She's just...there. Her father never bothers to return; her mother never bothers with her at all, constantly seeking a man to care for her. (To be fair, an ordinary Korean woman's opportunities a generation ago weren't plentiful, and San's mother wasn't exceptional.)
Children of addicts, the world over, tell versions of this same story. In this case, San's mother is addicted to men. She can't live without a man taking care of her, and she sacrifices the daughter she didn't want to get what she does want.
Author Shin isn't solely criticizing the mother. She is critiquing the social organization, the patriarchy, that privileges men and their desires over women and their needs so completely, so thoroughly, that the women are hollow and meaningless without a man. It is repulsive and it is reprehensible, and much abuse and violence simply are borne by the women because what option do they have? What other choice can they make? In San's case, she is so hollowed out by the complete absence of love from her mother (or anyone else) that she enacts the form of love she knows: rejection follows violence, as it must.
There is nothing forgiving in San. She forgives nothing, she is forgiven nothing, throughout the book. She is alone, she feels lonely of it (or so we infer...I don't know that she would be able to articulate the unmoored, disconnected reality that lonely people all share). For this, among other, reasons, this is a hard story to read. If you have ever been truly, down-to-the-bone lonely, this might be a triggering read for you. I haven't run across too many reads with this hyperconcentrated focus on loneliness, or too many with more success in rendering an emotional state into prose.
Because she knows nothing of love, loving, being loved, San sees nothing except the one moment when everything changed, when the one love she thought she had was denied and made nothing. Not even attempting to find her former home nets San anything, she sees not the fields of minari she grew up among, where her life irrevocably emptied out and flowed away from her, but careful rectilinear plots of...something not minari. She has no roots. She feels no kinship.
It was that kind of life. It won't end well, it didn't begin well or go on well; that much we know. There's nothing hopeful in this story. Women like San aren't ever anyone's focus...her job in the flower shop working with and for Su-ae notwithstanding. She receives the desperate, genuine love of Su-ae as...nothing. San is fixated on emptiness...her only friend abandoned her!...and on men she does not want. She needs their love. She doesn't want it. She decided long ago that love wasn't something she could have, feel, receive, give. And so when it's offered to her she...doesn't see it. She does see the want of one man, she feels the desperate pull of another man on her attention, and gets nothing but unwanted results.
A life of being unwanted, invisible, and it comes down to a final indignity. San is raped. Her hollowness filled at last with the violence that is all she can accept. It isn't in her to accept the reality of her situation, being unloved and unwanted, then seek out change. That's simply impossible. She leaves safety, courts rejection, and seeks oblivion.
Leaving behind only the tiniest of wakes...the end of the story of Oh San is a poignant piece of mythologizing that fit so poorly onto the rest of the story that I was forced by honest anger and sincere disdain for its sentimentality to whack a star off my rating. After a night's sleep where I dreamed of the photographer and San:
...I realized that his arc needed an end, too. I might not like that end, but I would've felt cheated (if not right away, then after my irritation with the whole ending subsided) had it not been there. So back came a half-star, though I confess with some grumbling on my part.
I think this small, powerful story deserves your eyeblinks. I think we should all resolve to notice the Oh Sans of this world, to extend a welcome to the table of them, to recognize their living presence instead of making them ghosts before they die.
I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: This translation from the Korean joins a widening stream of Korean-culture transplants...Squid Game, Minari, this author's previously translated novel Please Look After Mom ...making their roots into American pop-cultural soil.
If you've yet to explore the trickle, start now before it's a flood. I think it's wonderful because English-language monoglot culture gets stale and boring and all alike if we don't seek out fresh infusions of talent and stories. And, like all the best translations, this story's timelessness is rendered in prose that could very easily have been first created in English...none of the occasional signals of awkwardly trying to explicate something that one word in the translated language would convey whole and entire. That is a fine achievement indeed, probably helped along by the fact that things like "minari" aren't quite as furrin as they would've been in 2011, when Please Look After Mom was published.
What happens in this story is not particularly new or unusual. A girl is born to unfit parents:
In a house with shut doors, a mother closes her eyes as the baby’s grandmother offers her the newborn. The mother knows what will happen now. An uncelebrated girl. The infant accepts her mother’s closed eyes in lieu of a loving caress, perhaps having intuited her fate from the womb, and does not bother crying. The sound of the monsoon fills the house. Underneath the porch, a dog curls its legs into itself. Can the baby hear the sound of the rain? She’s about to fall asleep in her grandmother’s hands. That same night, her father gives his daughter’s face only a cursory glance.
Thus does another unwanted girl enter the world that won't ever bother to see her, really even to look at her. She's just...there. Her father never bothers to return; her mother never bothers with her at all, constantly seeking a man to care for her. (To be fair, an ordinary Korean woman's opportunities a generation ago weren't plentiful, and San's mother wasn't exceptional.)
Her mother. San thinks about her from time to time.
If she had begged her to stay, in front of that carefully prepared food, would she have listened? Why had San never once tried to hold her back? Wherever it was that her mother went, she never forgot to send her daughter money for school until San graduated.
The last time San had seen her mother was when she was a freshman in high school.
Children of addicts, the world over, tell versions of this same story. In this case, San's mother is addicted to men. She can't live without a man taking care of her, and she sacrifices the daughter she didn't want to get what she does want.
Author Shin isn't solely criticizing the mother. She is critiquing the social organization, the patriarchy, that privileges men and their desires over women and their needs so completely, so thoroughly, that the women are hollow and meaningless without a man. It is repulsive and it is reprehensible, and much abuse and violence simply are borne by the women because what option do they have? What other choice can they make? In San's case, she is so hollowed out by the complete absence of love from her mother (or anyone else) that she enacts the form of love she knows: rejection follows violence, as it must.
There is nothing forgiving in San. She forgives nothing, she is forgiven nothing, throughout the book. She is alone, she feels lonely of it (or so we infer...I don't know that she would be able to articulate the unmoored, disconnected reality that lonely people all share). For this, among other, reasons, this is a hard story to read. If you have ever been truly, down-to-the-bone lonely, this might be a triggering read for you. I haven't run across too many reads with this hyperconcentrated focus on loneliness, or too many with more success in rendering an emotional state into prose.
A stranger to every single person in the crowd, San finds herself blocking the sidewalk as people swerve to avoid her. Even if a carnival were to break out around her, the vacant expression on her face looks entrenched enough to persist.
Because she knows nothing of love, loving, being loved, San sees nothing except the one moment when everything changed, when the one love she thought she had was denied and made nothing. Not even attempting to find her former home nets San anything, she sees not the fields of minari she grew up among, where her life irrevocably emptied out and flowed away from her, but careful rectilinear plots of...something not minari. She has no roots. She feels no kinship.
Nothing happened this past summer. Only that, in the hot sun from time to time, a brief thought would appear and disappear around me. That thought was closer to me than any of the flowers in the shop. Even as I tried to capture the thought on paper, the heat would exhaust me and I'd give up. There were plenty of things I gave up, using the heat as an excuse. Which means I spent this past summer repeatedly deciding to do things and then giving up on them. As if my life were an exhibition of how good I am at giving up. It was that kind of summer.
It was that kind of life. It won't end well, it didn't begin well or go on well; that much we know. There's nothing hopeful in this story. Women like San aren't ever anyone's focus...her job in the flower shop working with and for Su-ae notwithstanding. She receives the desperate, genuine love of Su-ae as...nothing. San is fixated on emptiness...her only friend abandoned her!...and on men she does not want. She needs their love. She doesn't want it. She decided long ago that love wasn't something she could have, feel, receive, give. And so when it's offered to her she...doesn't see it. She does see the want of one man, she feels the desperate pull of another man on her attention, and gets nothing but unwanted results.
Every attempt to resist is met with his greater strength. In a moment, her head begins to droop.
She's released onto the street.
Her mind is completely taken over, her body a husk. No one seems to take note of the loneliness she carries. Just some woman in the crowd, unaware that her top is undone. A more observant person might have noticed her cheek slightly swollen from having been punched, the thin lines of her face a touch asymmetrical because of it. Someone might see her pale face and think, How could anyone ever look so pale....
A life of being unwanted, invisible, and it comes down to a final indignity. San is raped. Her hollowness filled at last with the violence that is all she can accept. It isn't in her to accept the reality of her situation, being unloved and unwanted, then seek out change. That's simply impossible. She leaves safety, courts rejection, and seeks oblivion.
Leaving behind only the tiniest of wakes...the end of the story of Oh San is a poignant piece of mythologizing that fit so poorly onto the rest of the story that I was forced by honest anger and sincere disdain for its sentimentality to whack a star off my rating. After a night's sleep where I dreamed of the photographer and San:
Violets. They bloom everywhere, making them seem more like weeds than proper flowers. San takes a closer look at them. Their little green leaves are small, their purple blossoms tiny. Before she came to the flower shop, she knew them as swallow flowers. Memories of entangling two swallow flower stems together and pulling them apart— one side was bound to snap. Whoever’s stem didn’t was the winner. She forgot what the prizes were, but she’d played the game many times. They did it with broadleaf plantains; they did it with foxtails.
The man keeps pressing the shutter and mumbling something discontentedly. “What’s so pretty about these flowers? Such nonsense.” His disappointment is so palpable, it makes her apologetic.
...I realized that his arc needed an end, too. I might not like that end, but I would've felt cheated (if not right away, then after my irritation with the whole ending subsided) had it not been there. So back came a half-star, though I confess with some grumbling on my part.
I think this small, powerful story deserves your eyeblinks. I think we should all resolve to notice the Oh Sans of this world, to extend a welcome to the table of them, to recognize their living presence instead of making them ghosts before they die.
April 30, 2022
This is one of those books that gets better after you read it. While reading I wasn't really into it, not the writing, not the characters and not sure I found the plot.
After finishing and reading the authors intentions with the book things fell into place and had me see things more. Basically it explained some of the feelings I had while reading.
After finishing and reading the authors intentions with the book things fell into place and had me see things more. Basically it explained some of the feelings I had while reading.
June 12, 2022
Violet = violate. Coincidence? I think not.
This is a very delicate novel enriched with quiet observations and subtle understandings. While Violets appears to focus around San, a lonely woman who was abandoned by her mom and rejected by her childhood friend, it is essentially a story about the many kinds of violation men perpetrated against women. Violation of space? Check. Violation of emotion? Check. Violation of privacy? Check. Violation of dignity? Check. Violation of body? F*cking check. That said, in contrast to the instances of men violating women in this book, we also get to witness the warmth, affection and tenderness that the women here had for one another; the childhood love San had for Namae, the friendship she built with Su-Ae, the protection she offered to her landlady who was abused by her husband.
In addition to the violence thrusted in the face of women in this novel, Violets is also a quite meditation on repression, loneliness and isolation. In writing this novel, Kyung-Sook Shin aims to magnify the voices of women who, like violets, are often cast aside and “exists in silence”, “making them appear more like weeds than proper flowers.” The main character, like violets, is often overlooked and disregarded since she was a child. She “wilt” when exposed to harsh sunlight yet she is also strong enough to “grow” through cracks of brick paths. Although the ending was tragic and certainly not what I hoped for, I, like the author, hope that San will find the fortitude to escape from her isolation and loneliness and walk forth into the light.
For its beautiful writing and narrative, as well as its ability to capture the subtle nuances of human nature, Violets is one of the best books that I have read this year. There is so much greatness packed into 212 pages here and I can’t wait to reading more of the author’s works in the future. My thanks to Pansing Distribution for a review copy of this precious gem. I appreciate it so much.
(Content warnings: Rape, domestic abuse, homophobia, abandonment)
4.5/5
This is a very delicate novel enriched with quiet observations and subtle understandings. While Violets appears to focus around San, a lonely woman who was abandoned by her mom and rejected by her childhood friend, it is essentially a story about the many kinds of violation men perpetrated against women. Violation of space? Check. Violation of emotion? Check. Violation of privacy? Check. Violation of dignity? Check. Violation of body? F*cking check. That said, in contrast to the instances of men violating women in this book, we also get to witness the warmth, affection and tenderness that the women here had for one another; the childhood love San had for Namae, the friendship she built with Su-Ae, the protection she offered to her landlady who was abused by her husband.
In addition to the violence thrusted in the face of women in this novel, Violets is also a quite meditation on repression, loneliness and isolation. In writing this novel, Kyung-Sook Shin aims to magnify the voices of women who, like violets, are often cast aside and “exists in silence”, “making them appear more like weeds than proper flowers.” The main character, like violets, is often overlooked and disregarded since she was a child. She “wilt” when exposed to harsh sunlight yet she is also strong enough to “grow” through cracks of brick paths. Although the ending was tragic and certainly not what I hoped for, I, like the author, hope that San will find the fortitude to escape from her isolation and loneliness and walk forth into the light.
For its beautiful writing and narrative, as well as its ability to capture the subtle nuances of human nature, Violets is one of the best books that I have read this year. There is so much greatness packed into 212 pages here and I can’t wait to reading more of the author’s works in the future. My thanks to Pansing Distribution for a review copy of this precious gem. I appreciate it so much.
(Content warnings: Rape, domestic abuse, homophobia, abandonment)
4.5/5
December 10, 2022
On the Inaugural Longlist of Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle
Violet: Noun, a plant, a swallow flower . . . purple, the color, also used to describe . . . an oversensitive person, a shy person (“shrinking violet”)
Violin: Noun, a musical instrument. . . a player of, a violinist
Violence: Noun, a disturbance, disruption, destruction
Violator: Noun, one who breaks rules, invades, insults, rapes
Violets is Anton Hur’s translation of the novel 바이올렛 by 신경숙 (and great to see the original title in 한글 as well as the translator’s name on the cover).
The author, whose name is Romanised as Shin Kyung-sook, came to prominence in English with the bestselling Please Look After Mom, Chi-Young Kim’s translation of her 2009 novel 엄마를 부탁해, and which won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012. This is from an earlier (2001) novel in the original.
Anton Hur, part of the Smoking Tigers Collective, is increasingly becoming a leading translator from Korean, this I believe his 7th book, and the 4th I have read (the previous three: Love in the Big City, Cursed Bunny and The Underground Village).
The novel, narrated in the present tense, opens in the countryside in a chapter titled Where the Minari Grows (a plant that, post the 2021 Oscars, needs less introduction to Western readers than had the novel been translated earlier);
One day in July, rain pours from the skies. In a house with shut doors, a mother closes her eyes as the baby’s grandmother offers her the newborn. The mother knows what will happen now. An uncelebrated girl. The infant accepts her mother’s closed eyes in lieu of a loving caress, perhaps having intuited her fate from the womb, and does not bother crying. The sound of the monsoon fills the house. Underneath the porch, a dog curls its legs into itself. Can the baby hear the sound of the rain? She’s about to fall asleep in her grandmother’s hands. That same night, her father gives his daughter’s face only a cursory glance.
The baby is Oh San, the focus of the novel. San has a troubled and lonely childhood, her father rejecting her mother for another woman able to give him a son, and her mother then embarking on a range of short-lived and ill-fated affairs.
She has just one childhood friend, Namae whose father is a drunk, and this first part of the novel revolves around a incident in the village minari field when the girls are around 9, one which for San binds their relationship but for Namae violates it.
Little San had felt, I will love you more than myself. Namae had felt, This is the end of the oath we made on the grave. She had said goodbye to San forever.
The main part of the novel is set in central Seoul almost 15 years later, with San turning 23 and arriving alone in the city, having broken off contact with her mother. Trying but failing to find work as a word processor operator she chances across a help-wanted advert in a flower shop (the accurate and detailed, at times street-by-street and building-by-building, evocation of Seoul's rapidly changing cityscape one of the novel's signatures):
This flower shop is an unexpected oasis. It faces the parking lot of Seoul’s Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, acting as a brief respite from the busy noise of surrounding traffic. A conveyor-belt sushi restaurant serving twin pieces of sushi or egg rolls on each plate, a Paris Baguette bakery franchise, a kimbap place barely squeezing in three tables, a stone-bowl rice shop, a 24-hour convenience store, a foreign language cram school, a stationery shop, a store specializing in photo albums, a bookstore kiosk set up between buildings, a new Mediterranean-style pasta place, a café named Spring Summer Autumn Winter— and amidst all these stores is a flower shop of considerable size, looking somewhat out of place, almost cinematic.
Taking the role she forms a strong bond with her co-worker, and soon roommate, Lee Su-ae. The flower shop offers her a refuge from her thoughts (which at times tube novel perhaps spells out a little too directly) but her repressed emotions are triggered by two incidents:
An incident with Su-as which brings back memories of the incident in the minari field:
Back then, there was a minari field. An irrigation ditch where clear water flowed. A dyke they dried their wet clothes on. A girl whose father would get drunk and crawl into a jar to sing. A small white back, and a green spot like a grass stain. Black pupils. Braided hair sitting on delicate shoulders. Thin cheeks splashed with water.
And a visit to the shop from a magazine photographer asked to illustrate a story on violets that leads to an infatuation:
Violets. They bloom everywhere, making them seem more like weeds than proper flowers. San takes a closer look at them. Their little green leaves are small, their purple blossoms tiny. Before she came to the flower shop, she knew them as swallow flowers. Memories of entangling two swallow flower stems together and pulling them apart— one side was bound to snap. Whoever’s stem didn’t was the winner. She forgot what the prizes were, but she’d played the game many times. They did it with broadleaf plantains; they did it with foxtails.
The man keeps pressing the shutter and mumbling something discontentedly. “What’s so pretty about these flowers? Such nonsense.” His disappointment is so palpable, it makes her apologetic.
Overall, a powerful tale of loneliness, repressed desire, obsession, violation and misogyny. Often when a translated novel breaks through in the Anglosphere and the author's earlier novels are translated, they don't love up to the same standard. Here, although less commercial, this was to me an even stronger novel than Please Look After Mom and very much recommended.
The streets keep changing as if to erase every trace of her. There’s a new parking lot near Gyeonghuimun, and a new marinated crab restaurant called Mir in the next alley. Café Bonjour has changed its sign, declaring itself a restaurant, and in the Hengeuk Life Insurance building, an art cinema called Cinecube has opened. On its ground floor is a new French restaurant called Russian. The building has a little fountain as well as wooden benches and a small grove of bamboo. Next to the art museum, where the ravenous excavator used to be, ready to destroy all and everything, is a new building. This building, with its countless windows, now blocks the view of the taps where San gathered water in plastic bottles. It is impossible to tell where exactly San planted her white , yellow , purple and pink violets. An embattled-looking conscript on leave is standing at a stationery street vendor, choosing a new notebook. A middle-aged man drops a ₩ 10,000 note into a Salvation Army kettle. From the cinema on the street to Jeong-dong leading to Pauline Books and Changdeok Girls’ Middle School, youths are pouring out under the darkening sky. A young woman who has lost her party is looking around as the lights blink on one by one. San is no longer on these streets.
Thanks to the publisher, W&N, via Netgalley for the ARC.
Violet: Noun, a plant, a swallow flower . . . purple, the color, also used to describe . . . an oversensitive person, a shy person (“shrinking violet”)
Violin: Noun, a musical instrument. . . a player of, a violinist
Violence: Noun, a disturbance, disruption, destruction
Violator: Noun, one who breaks rules, invades, insults, rapes
Violets is Anton Hur’s translation of the novel 바이올렛 by 신경숙 (and great to see the original title in 한글 as well as the translator’s name on the cover).
The author, whose name is Romanised as Shin Kyung-sook, came to prominence in English with the bestselling Please Look After Mom, Chi-Young Kim’s translation of her 2009 novel 엄마를 부탁해, and which won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012. This is from an earlier (2001) novel in the original.
Anton Hur, part of the Smoking Tigers Collective, is increasingly becoming a leading translator from Korean, this I believe his 7th book, and the 4th I have read (the previous three: Love in the Big City, Cursed Bunny and The Underground Village).
The novel, narrated in the present tense, opens in the countryside in a chapter titled Where the Minari Grows (a plant that, post the 2021 Oscars, needs less introduction to Western readers than had the novel been translated earlier);
One day in July, rain pours from the skies. In a house with shut doors, a mother closes her eyes as the baby’s grandmother offers her the newborn. The mother knows what will happen now. An uncelebrated girl. The infant accepts her mother’s closed eyes in lieu of a loving caress, perhaps having intuited her fate from the womb, and does not bother crying. The sound of the monsoon fills the house. Underneath the porch, a dog curls its legs into itself. Can the baby hear the sound of the rain? She’s about to fall asleep in her grandmother’s hands. That same night, her father gives his daughter’s face only a cursory glance.
The baby is Oh San, the focus of the novel. San has a troubled and lonely childhood, her father rejecting her mother for another woman able to give him a son, and her mother then embarking on a range of short-lived and ill-fated affairs.
She has just one childhood friend, Namae whose father is a drunk, and this first part of the novel revolves around a incident in the village minari field when the girls are around 9, one which for San binds their relationship but for Namae violates it.
Little San had felt, I will love you more than myself. Namae had felt, This is the end of the oath we made on the grave. She had said goodbye to San forever.
The main part of the novel is set in central Seoul almost 15 years later, with San turning 23 and arriving alone in the city, having broken off contact with her mother. Trying but failing to find work as a word processor operator she chances across a help-wanted advert in a flower shop (the accurate and detailed, at times street-by-street and building-by-building, evocation of Seoul's rapidly changing cityscape one of the novel's signatures):
This flower shop is an unexpected oasis. It faces the parking lot of Seoul’s Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, acting as a brief respite from the busy noise of surrounding traffic. A conveyor-belt sushi restaurant serving twin pieces of sushi or egg rolls on each plate, a Paris Baguette bakery franchise, a kimbap place barely squeezing in three tables, a stone-bowl rice shop, a 24-hour convenience store, a foreign language cram school, a stationery shop, a store specializing in photo albums, a bookstore kiosk set up between buildings, a new Mediterranean-style pasta place, a café named Spring Summer Autumn Winter— and amidst all these stores is a flower shop of considerable size, looking somewhat out of place, almost cinematic.
Taking the role she forms a strong bond with her co-worker, and soon roommate, Lee Su-ae. The flower shop offers her a refuge from her thoughts (which at times tube novel perhaps spells out a little too directly) but her repressed emotions are triggered by two incidents:
An incident with Su-as which brings back memories of the incident in the minari field:
Back then, there was a minari field. An irrigation ditch where clear water flowed. A dyke they dried their wet clothes on. A girl whose father would get drunk and crawl into a jar to sing. A small white back, and a green spot like a grass stain. Black pupils. Braided hair sitting on delicate shoulders. Thin cheeks splashed with water.
And a visit to the shop from a magazine photographer asked to illustrate a story on violets that leads to an infatuation:
Violets. They bloom everywhere, making them seem more like weeds than proper flowers. San takes a closer look at them. Their little green leaves are small, their purple blossoms tiny. Before she came to the flower shop, she knew them as swallow flowers. Memories of entangling two swallow flower stems together and pulling them apart— one side was bound to snap. Whoever’s stem didn’t was the winner. She forgot what the prizes were, but she’d played the game many times. They did it with broadleaf plantains; they did it with foxtails.
The man keeps pressing the shutter and mumbling something discontentedly. “What’s so pretty about these flowers? Such nonsense.” His disappointment is so palpable, it makes her apologetic.
Overall, a powerful tale of loneliness, repressed desire, obsession, violation and misogyny. Often when a translated novel breaks through in the Anglosphere and the author's earlier novels are translated, they don't love up to the same standard. Here, although less commercial, this was to me an even stronger novel than Please Look After Mom and very much recommended.
The streets keep changing as if to erase every trace of her. There’s a new parking lot near Gyeonghuimun, and a new marinated crab restaurant called Mir in the next alley. Café Bonjour has changed its sign, declaring itself a restaurant, and in the Hengeuk Life Insurance building, an art cinema called Cinecube has opened. On its ground floor is a new French restaurant called Russian. The building has a little fountain as well as wooden benches and a small grove of bamboo. Next to the art museum, where the ravenous excavator used to be, ready to destroy all and everything, is a new building. This building, with its countless windows, now blocks the view of the taps where San gathered water in plastic bottles. It is impossible to tell where exactly San planted her white , yellow , purple and pink violets. An embattled-looking conscript on leave is standing at a stationery street vendor, choosing a new notebook. A middle-aged man drops a ₩ 10,000 note into a Salvation Army kettle. From the cinema on the street to Jeong-dong leading to Pauline Books and Changdeok Girls’ Middle School, youths are pouring out under the darkening sky. A young woman who has lost her party is looking around as the lights blink on one by one. San is no longer on these streets.
Thanks to the publisher, W&N, via Netgalley for the ARC.
April 8, 2022
I don’t know about this one. It’s good enough, but I just didn’t understand San. I found her choices and reactions confusing and strange and maybe not very believable? She is certainly a very lonely girl, but it is almost as if she chooses to be lonely, because there are some people that are willing to help her.
Thank you The Feminist Press and Edelweiss for the ARC.
Thank you The Feminist Press and Edelweiss for the ARC.
February 8, 2022
Violets is an ethereal reflection on mental illness, violence, and confusing urges that all propel a sense of deep loneliness.
Oh San is a young Korean woman who has effectively raised herself following her father's departure to be with his other family and her mother's constant chasing after new men. As a young girl in a village in South Korea she has a deeply intimate moment with Namae, another young girl, but this moment goes awry as both women wrestle with the meaning of their desire for one another. Fast forward years and San begins work in a Seoul flower shop where she meets her new soon-to-be roommate Sae'na. These two women form what seems to be an intimate bond until San's own mental illnesses sends her into a tailspin of loneliness and internal traps.
Shin Kyung-sok's writing is moving and beautiful. Though at times the story can drag and it feels as though not much is happening, Violets is written in such a way that the inner life of San is opened up to the reader in all its complexity and timidity. Shin's style itself evokes a deep sense of loneliness and after finishing the book - and connecting so deeply with the main character - you're left wondering if in fact the whole reading experience had just been one long, lonely dream.
Oh San is a young Korean woman who has effectively raised herself following her father's departure to be with his other family and her mother's constant chasing after new men. As a young girl in a village in South Korea she has a deeply intimate moment with Namae, another young girl, but this moment goes awry as both women wrestle with the meaning of their desire for one another. Fast forward years and San begins work in a Seoul flower shop where she meets her new soon-to-be roommate Sae'na. These two women form what seems to be an intimate bond until San's own mental illnesses sends her into a tailspin of loneliness and internal traps.
Shin Kyung-sok's writing is moving and beautiful. Though at times the story can drag and it feels as though not much is happening, Violets is written in such a way that the inner life of San is opened up to the reader in all its complexity and timidity. Shin's style itself evokes a deep sense of loneliness and after finishing the book - and connecting so deeply with the main character - you're left wondering if in fact the whole reading experience had just been one long, lonely dream.
June 11, 2023
Pióro autorki jest zdumiewające i przenikliwe, ale sama historia do mnie nie trafiła.
January 19, 2022
I for one am really excited by all of the east Asian fiction appearing in translation in English in the last couple of years, and Violets is an excellent addition to the canon. Written in 2001 - but it reads as if it was written today - it follows Shin Kyung-sook's 2009 novel Please Look After Mother, published in English translation in 2011 (which I also enjoyed greatly).
Violets is more character than plot driven, following Oh San, a young woman from rural Korea. She is a loner as a child until she befriends another young girl named Namae. It's difficult to put it better than the blurb does: "Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation."
Fast-forward to San moving to Seoul aged 22, where she gets a job in a flower shop and becomes friends with her only colleague, Su-ae. From here her life begins to change somewhat, but her encounter with Namae lingers in her mind and seems to shape her life and later decisions.
Violets is a slippery beast in some ways, defying categorisation -- just when you think the story is going one way it goes in a different direction (this sounds like there are ridiculous plot twists but that's not the case at all), and the ending in particular took me somewhat by surprise. The story is meandering but in a good way, showing the loneliness and thwarted desire of one young woman which could be said to be representative of many city dwellers (and many Koreans if the other characters are anything to go by). This was - in some very loosely related way - what I wanted Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 to be, and I can only recommend it highly.
Thank you Netgalley and W&N/Orion for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
Violets is more character than plot driven, following Oh San, a young woman from rural Korea. She is a loner as a child until she befriends another young girl named Namae. It's difficult to put it better than the blurb does: "Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation."
Fast-forward to San moving to Seoul aged 22, where she gets a job in a flower shop and becomes friends with her only colleague, Su-ae. From here her life begins to change somewhat, but her encounter with Namae lingers in her mind and seems to shape her life and later decisions.
Violets is a slippery beast in some ways, defying categorisation -- just when you think the story is going one way it goes in a different direction (this sounds like there are ridiculous plot twists but that's not the case at all), and the ending in particular took me somewhat by surprise. The story is meandering but in a good way, showing the loneliness and thwarted desire of one young woman which could be said to be representative of many city dwellers (and many Koreans if the other characters are anything to go by). This was - in some very loosely related way - what I wanted Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 to be, and I can only recommend it highly.
Thank you Netgalley and W&N/Orion for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
January 17, 2023
5/5 stars
“This desire grew slowly, stronger and stronger, but it never had any place to escape except for into sorrow. It has caused her to choose neglect. It has refused to be sublimated, but instead reappeared as a fresh green sadness.”
Violets is an absolutely haunting exploration of unmet desires, infatuation, and the fear of being forever unseen and overlooked. This was such a layered experience, filled with motifs of flowers, Greek mythology, language and more, that grew on me with every following page. By the start, I was reading a 3-star novel about an “ordinary girl” experiencing “ordinary things”. By the end I had read a phenomenally crafted masterpiece that will live rent free in my mind for quite some time to come.
I’m usually the kind of reader that needs to be able to relate to a main character, for a book to deeply impact me emotionally. With San, that wasn’t quite the case, yet I was still fascinated and invested in her as a character. Contrary to her reserved appearance, San experiences the world with an emotional intensity and contrast that’s seems to live in that phase between your late teens and early twenties. The world is loud and large around her; she is small and overlooked. She wishes to be seen, be captured and leave an imprint on the world, but also feels safe in her invisibility. She want to love; to connect, yet fears nothing more.
Shin Kyung-Sook packed so much into this character and story, so much of which felt so current to the time. Ironically so, since this book was written almost 15-years ago.
I tried to think of “readalikes” similar to this one. The closest I could come, mostly based on the feeling I got whilst reading it was Ghost Music by An Yu. Both differ quite a bit thematically and tonally, but evoke a similar feeling of sonder. A melancholic smallness, whilst coming of age a large Asian metropolis.
Thank you Matthew Sciarappa for championing and recommending this book over and over, leading to me eventually picking it up. You were só right!
“This desire grew slowly, stronger and stronger, but it never had any place to escape except for into sorrow. It has caused her to choose neglect. It has refused to be sublimated, but instead reappeared as a fresh green sadness.”
Violets is an absolutely haunting exploration of unmet desires, infatuation, and the fear of being forever unseen and overlooked. This was such a layered experience, filled with motifs of flowers, Greek mythology, language and more, that grew on me with every following page. By the start, I was reading a 3-star novel about an “ordinary girl” experiencing “ordinary things”. By the end I had read a phenomenally crafted masterpiece that will live rent free in my mind for quite some time to come.
I’m usually the kind of reader that needs to be able to relate to a main character, for a book to deeply impact me emotionally. With San, that wasn’t quite the case, yet I was still fascinated and invested in her as a character. Contrary to her reserved appearance, San experiences the world with an emotional intensity and contrast that’s seems to live in that phase between your late teens and early twenties. The world is loud and large around her; she is small and overlooked. She wishes to be seen, be captured and leave an imprint on the world, but also feels safe in her invisibility. She want to love; to connect, yet fears nothing more.
Shin Kyung-Sook packed so much into this character and story, so much of which felt so current to the time. Ironically so, since this book was written almost 15-years ago.
I tried to think of “readalikes” similar to this one. The closest I could come, mostly based on the feeling I got whilst reading it was Ghost Music by An Yu. Both differ quite a bit thematically and tonally, but evoke a similar feeling of sonder. A melancholic smallness, whilst coming of age a large Asian metropolis.
Thank you Matthew Sciarappa for championing and recommending this book over and over, leading to me eventually picking it up. You were só right!
October 21, 2023
I’m fine with books that have little “action” or plot. Sometimes nothing much can happen in a story but it’s still moving and impactful. This isn’t one of these. Violets is very dry and like trying to watch grass grow. The first chapter or two was interesting, but from there it goes downhill. The key plot aspect that makes the first chapters interesting, and what gave the story potential, is not nurtured throughout the narrative. The author is heavy on telling and not showing, especially with characters.
The story could have said something poignant about loneliness, sexuality, family or love. Instead it says a lot of words about nothing. Literally endless descriptions of MC walking various places and what stores “line the street”. This makes the major action at end of the story, which is supposed to be shocking, just feel… awkward and absurd.
Read this if you want repetitive descriptions of Seoul streets and the main character being less dimensional than a piece of paper.
The story could have said something poignant about loneliness, sexuality, family or love. Instead it says a lot of words about nothing. Literally endless descriptions of MC walking various places and what stores “line the street”. This makes the major action at end of the story, which is supposed to be shocking, just feel… awkward and absurd.
Read this if you want repetitive descriptions of Seoul streets and the main character being less dimensional than a piece of paper.
Want to read
September 3, 2022i saw this at my local indie bookstore and now i can't stop thinking about it, wanna read it soon <3
January 2, 2022
If you are looking for a book with beautiful prose and do not really mind a slow and perhaps inexistent dark-ish plot, this is your book.
The first chapters of Violets follow Oh San's tragic past with a dysfunctional family and a strange (perhaps even traumatic) event between herself and her friend Namae. Then, the book flash-forwards 15 years into the future to show us San finding a new job at a flower shop while living in Seoul by herself. The bookshop broadens her world to a new set of people and flowers and we, as readers, get to see how she struggles through this new world with all its social interactions as a quiet individual who prefers isolation.
When I started reading this book, I did not know what to expect. I think there was a moment in the book where I stopped reading and I just took a second to re-track all that San had gone through, suddenly understanding where we were going and what Violets was. Since the book was tagged as LGBTQ, I thought it would go in one direction and I am still pleased that it caught me by surprise, however dark and unfortunate the actual direction.
Now, the book in itself was something that threw me into a reading slump. I dreaded coming to it but, when I read it, I did not dislike it. I just felt it was plotless but lacked the comfy feeling of the slice of life genre. Violets felt like a character study of San who had lived things bigger than herself and could only give them up or run away from them. It felt almost voyeuristic to see her stuck in a place for a while and suffering through experiences and activities that did not come to her naturally. Overall, I just did not feel "right" while reading it. I felt similarly to Please Look After Mom by the same author - everything feels wrong and I just don't care about any of it. At this point, I think I may just not like Shin Kyung-sook's stuff (though I do have to say her writing is beautiful and Anton Hur's translation is, as always, top-notch).
Will I give Shin Kyung-sook another chance? Probably not. It has taken me a whole month to read this short book and being done with it felt like such an accomplishment. But hey, I have tried to read this to redeem Shin from Please Look After Mom (which I hated) and I appreciated what Violets did. In my heart, it's a 2/3 stars, but I cannot justify giving it that with what it accomplishes and the gorgeous writing.
*Received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and that's what you this is. See ya.
The first chapters of Violets follow Oh San's tragic past with a dysfunctional family and a strange (perhaps even traumatic) event between herself and her friend Namae. Then, the book flash-forwards 15 years into the future to show us San finding a new job at a flower shop while living in Seoul by herself. The bookshop broadens her world to a new set of people and flowers and we, as readers, get to see how she struggles through this new world with all its social interactions as a quiet individual who prefers isolation.
When I started reading this book, I did not know what to expect. I think there was a moment in the book where I stopped reading and I just took a second to re-track all that San had gone through, suddenly understanding where we were going and what Violets was. Since the book was tagged as LGBTQ, I thought it would go in one direction and I am still pleased that it caught me by surprise, however dark and unfortunate the actual direction.
Now, the book in itself was something that threw me into a reading slump. I dreaded coming to it but, when I read it, I did not dislike it. I just felt it was plotless but lacked the comfy feeling of the slice of life genre. Violets felt like a character study of San who had lived things bigger than herself and could only give them up or run away from them. It felt almost voyeuristic to see her stuck in a place for a while and suffering through experiences and activities that did not come to her naturally. Overall, I just did not feel "right" while reading it. I felt similarly to Please Look After Mom by the same author - everything feels wrong and I just don't care about any of it. At this point, I think I may just not like Shin Kyung-sook's stuff (though I do have to say her writing is beautiful and Anton Hur's translation is, as always, top-notch).
Will I give Shin Kyung-sook another chance? Probably not. It has taken me a whole month to read this short book and being done with it felt like such an accomplishment. But hey, I have tried to read this to redeem Shin from Please Look After Mom (which I hated) and I appreciated what Violets did. In my heart, it's a 2/3 stars, but I cannot justify giving it that with what it accomplishes and the gorgeous writing.
*Received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and that's what you this is. See ya.
August 9, 2023
“Memory is an unannounced visitor. It lies crumpled in some corner of the body, then suddenly knocks on the door of reality and makes you scream.”
🥀💐🥀💐🥀💐
Violets is a devastatingly gorgeous story about an unassuming, introverted woman who grapples with placelessness and identity following a traumatic childhood experience. Our protagonist San gradually wakes to friendship and passion as she navigates the complexities of contemporary Korean society.
The novel, in its dreamy portrayal, illustrates the self-destruction that unreciprocated and repressed longing can trigger in a person.
Violets leaves us pondering: What does it mean to voice our hopes and loneliness in a world where no one hears us? Where should we turn to when we don't feel like we belong?
In a particularly poignant scene, San notices that the word 'violet' appears after violence and violation in the English dictionary. She strives to embody those three words as they become interwoven synonymously in her mind, leading to a heart-wrenching climax. Shin is compassionate in her depictions of longing and hope in spite of the undercurrent of cruelty and devastation.
Violets is a requiem to the unseen women who endure rejection, erasure, and injustice in a world where they, like flowers, are "cherished" yet tread upon, cut from their stems.
🥀💐🥀💐🥀💐
Violets is a devastatingly gorgeous story about an unassuming, introverted woman who grapples with placelessness and identity following a traumatic childhood experience. Our protagonist San gradually wakes to friendship and passion as she navigates the complexities of contemporary Korean society.
The novel, in its dreamy portrayal, illustrates the self-destruction that unreciprocated and repressed longing can trigger in a person.
Violets leaves us pondering: What does it mean to voice our hopes and loneliness in a world where no one hears us? Where should we turn to when we don't feel like we belong?
In a particularly poignant scene, San notices that the word 'violet' appears after violence and violation in the English dictionary. She strives to embody those three words as they become interwoven synonymously in her mind, leading to a heart-wrenching climax. Shin is compassionate in her depictions of longing and hope in spite of the undercurrent of cruelty and devastation.
Violets is a requiem to the unseen women who endure rejection, erasure, and injustice in a world where they, like flowers, are "cherished" yet tread upon, cut from their stems.
March 5, 2022
well i was liking this and then. the ending.
Rep: Korean cast & setting, sapphic mc
CWs: homophobia, rape, self harm, implied suicide
Rep: Korean cast & setting, sapphic mc
CWs: homophobia, rape, self harm, implied suicide
December 31, 2022
it got better and better until the ending… I can’t remember the last time I was so taken aback by an ending
short rtc, 2.5 stars
short rtc, 2.5 stars
October 31, 2021
One of Kyung sook Shin's first novels, written was she was in her 20's, it seems as if she wrote it today. It called to me and I feel that the book resonates with the moment about women and queer desire thwarted by society and family in the rigid Korea. It's as poetic as Wordsworth and as delicate as fine Austrian lace but it stings with a power and sharp observations that only Shin can deliver in her language that stays with my mind forever. This is a gorgeous ode to the forgotten women everywhere -- the women who are not on social media or twitter or facebook; they aren't celebrities or influencers, they can barely express their own feelings to themselves.. this book is for them. This book is about the women we neglect and who, instead we should celebrate. Here , finally, is their book. VIOLETS is the older queer sister to The Vegetarian it feels, written years before Han Kang's book and if you loved The Vegetarian as much as I did, you will love VIOLETS.
April 17, 2024
3.75☆ — this to me is one of those quiet novels; a silence suffused with something heavy and tragic, a silence punctuated only by the whooshing of the minari in the winds and the occasional murmur. i enjoyed the atmospheric writing and the concept of san as a character: doomed to repeatedly find herself sabotaging her own situation, the hollow winds of loneliness thrumming just under her chest.
"where the minari grows, this scene i kept only to myself, her dry lips, a soft joy, the deep green spot, i will love you more than myself—these are where the letters blur."
"where the minari grows, this scene i kept only to myself, her dry lips, a soft joy, the deep green spot, i will love you more than myself—these are where the letters blur."
December 23, 2023
Świetne zakończenie, ale całość bez większych emocji. Piękne, bardzo uspokajające opisy kwiatów, ale z drugiej strony inne opisy już mi się tak nie podobały. Raczej mam mieszane uczucia.
July 28, 2023
'Violets are very small plants. So small, they’re easily overlooked as weeds. That’s why I decided on the title Violets. There are women all around us who exist in silence, anonymous and without anything special about them; she could be me and she could be you.'
April 23, 2023
Intense and just.
Heartbreaking.
My heart is in very severe pain. It aches.
Edited Review: 24/4/2023
I guess it took me quite a while to put my coherent thoughts on this beautiful novel. I picked this book during one of those days - where I didn't want to think much but just feel - and this book gave me all of it. Its a quiet yet heart-wrenching read that on the surface seemed to be a story that revolves around a girl who is eccentric and found solace with the flowers that she found, but its more than that. Its a story of the repression of women and their voices in society , its the story of the abuses, loud and quiet that has been inflicted to women and its a story of a woman who is more than what she grants herself for . With the beautiful prose by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated by the ever lovely Anton Hur - this book is a reticent work that makes the voice of the characters seemed loud and interlaced with the language of flowers in producing one of the best books I've read for awhile.
For Violets is seemed to be an ordinary flower, almost be looking like a wallflower - is always there but never really looked closely to - its the depiction of women in society in the POV of San, her life and the friendship that she built with Namae and the flowers that she worked in a flower shop. Some Major Disclaimers , I feel that with all books, there is a time for it - and I highly suggest picking this book up when you totally be immersed in the story - as the proses can be tight and suffocating even if the book seemed like a short read.
I honestly want to hug San so bad, to a point that it made me ache so much for her whilst reading the story. She is one of the characters that I've come across that will never leave my head for the most pitiful. The title Violets and the cover made so much sense when the story came to an end. Its showing how women had been so oppressed with their voices that they were forced to choose violence - even by inflicting it on themselves - to leave a mark to the world.
Whilst Kyung Sook Shin has one of the best written proses I've read in Korean Literature that will make you want to hurl things at somebody whilst feeling very calm (weird feeling I know), I feel that this book showed how Exquisite and Breathtaking her writing is. I loved how she incorporated flowers and the environment in general in this book. It almost felt like I was there, watching San's life in an old movie theatre, where you'll be transported into a place that felt almost ethereal. Shin had conveyed each and every feeling of the character - interwoven beautifully into a story of a woman in search of herself and mostly of her life's meaning. Not many authors can take you on that journey and I have to thank the translator for doing such a good job in conveying each proses with precision. You can feel how much the translator is invested in this book, and I am thankful that I get to read more exceptional works from both the author and the translator himself.
There was a line in the Author's notes that had gotten me really teary :-
And indeed, the author had did just that with the story. The tone is mellow, and tranquil but it holds a significance amount of hurricane, expressed through the emotions of the characters and the repression of woman and the minority has to face throughout their whole lives. It showed how a mundane woman can never raise her voice unless amplified through a story like this, talked about and discussed and perhaps lead to a better change in this world.
I hope someday, that no matter who, your voice will be amplified as well. Seek help when you need. My thoughts can never do justice to how this book had made me felt, but I hope for once, you could be seen through this story.
Personal Ratings: 4.5🌟
Thank you to @definitelybooks for this copy :)
Heartbreaking.
My heart is in very severe pain. It aches.
Edited Review: 24/4/2023
I guess it took me quite a while to put my coherent thoughts on this beautiful novel. I picked this book during one of those days - where I didn't want to think much but just feel - and this book gave me all of it. Its a quiet yet heart-wrenching read that on the surface seemed to be a story that revolves around a girl who is eccentric and found solace with the flowers that she found, but its more than that. Its a story of the repression of women and their voices in society , its the story of the abuses, loud and quiet that has been inflicted to women and its a story of a woman who is more than what she grants herself for . With the beautiful prose by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated by the ever lovely Anton Hur - this book is a reticent work that makes the voice of the characters seemed loud and interlaced with the language of flowers in producing one of the best books I've read for awhile.
Violet.
Violence.
Violator.
For Violets is seemed to be an ordinary flower, almost be looking like a wallflower - is always there but never really looked closely to - its the depiction of women in society in the POV of San, her life and the friendship that she built with Namae and the flowers that she worked in a flower shop. Some Major Disclaimers , I feel that with all books, there is a time for it - and I highly suggest picking this book up when you totally be immersed in the story - as the proses can be tight and suffocating even if the book seemed like a short read.
I honestly want to hug San so bad, to a point that it made me ache so much for her whilst reading the story. She is one of the characters that I've come across that will never leave my head for the most pitiful. The title Violets and the cover made so much sense when the story came to an end. Its showing how women had been so oppressed with their voices that they were forced to choose violence - even by inflicting it on themselves - to leave a mark to the world.
"I want to hide my pain from the flowers. I don't want to tell them of life's suffering. Because if they know my sadness, the flowers will cry too."
Whilst Kyung Sook Shin has one of the best written proses I've read in Korean Literature that will make you want to hurl things at somebody whilst feeling very calm (weird feeling I know), I feel that this book showed how Exquisite and Breathtaking her writing is. I loved how she incorporated flowers and the environment in general in this book. It almost felt like I was there, watching San's life in an old movie theatre, where you'll be transported into a place that felt almost ethereal. Shin had conveyed each and every feeling of the character - interwoven beautifully into a story of a woman in search of herself and mostly of her life's meaning. Not many authors can take you on that journey and I have to thank the translator for doing such a good job in conveying each proses with precision. You can feel how much the translator is invested in this book, and I am thankful that I get to read more exceptional works from both the author and the translator himself.
There was a line in the Author's notes that had gotten me really teary :-
"There are women all around us who exist in silence, anonymous and without anything special about them ; she could be me and she could be you. To amplify the voices of those women, whom no one could hear unless one was listening very carefully, to let them speak through my words - this is Violets.
And indeed, the author had did just that with the story. The tone is mellow, and tranquil but it holds a significance amount of hurricane, expressed through the emotions of the characters and the repression of woman and the minority has to face throughout their whole lives. It showed how a mundane woman can never raise her voice unless amplified through a story like this, talked about and discussed and perhaps lead to a better change in this world.
"I wonder, is this your first time hearing this cry? This cry, which for centuries was never given an ear, or a means to be heard.
I hope someday, that no matter who, your voice will be amplified as well. Seek help when you need. My thoughts can never do justice to how this book had made me felt, but I hope for once, you could be seen through this story.
Personal Ratings: 4.5🌟
Thank you to @definitelybooks for this copy :)
January 14, 2022
"Violet: Noun, a plant, a swallow flower . . . purple, the color, also used to describe . . . an oversensitive person, a shy person (“shrinking violet”)
Violin: Noun, a musical instrument. . . a player of, a violinist
Violence: Noun, a disturbance, disruption, destruction
Violator: Noun, one who breaks rules, invades, insults, rapes"
Violets follows the story of San, who grows up in a small rural community. Since young, San was neglected by her mother and rejected by her father. Not to mention that San's outsider status fortifies the villagers' discriminatory attitude towards her. She met Namae (whose father was an alcoholic) and both became good friends. One afternoon in a minari field, both San and Namae engaged in a moment of physical intimacy which led to Namae's rejection of San. Since then, Namae distanced herself from San. Around 15 years later, San arrived in central Seoul and found a job in a flower shop. She met Su-ae, another florist in the flower shop and both instantly became good friends and roommates. While working in the flower shop, San also met other customers, in particular, a sexually aggressive businessman and an attractive photographer. Navigating herself in the huge city of Seoul, can San finally free herself from the violent encounter with Namae, which resulted in her isolation and suppressed desire?
Last year, I've witnessed Katie Kitamura's quiet yet powerful writing via Intimacies. Violets sends out some Intimacies vibes but with Kyung-Sook Shin's distinctive voice. It is a subtle story about isolation, loneliness, desire, and more importantly, suppressed queer desire, which is very aptly described in an Asian setting. Shin's detailed observations of Seoul's landscape and atmosphere mirrored San's loneliness, awkwardness, and her attempts in assimilating with Seoul's city culture. Her obsession with the photographer and finally the businessman amplified her uncertainty vis-a-vis her sexuality and grapples with desire. Most of the male characters as incorporated by Shin in Violets indirectly depict the toxic masculinity, patriarchy which is deeply rooted in the Korean society. The treatment by a policeman and the businessman towards San in a few critical scenes highlighted how women could easily be violated by men and are constantly the prey of men. Shin's unapologetic depiction of the city's neglect towards a woman who was being violated sends a chill down my spine: "She's released into the street. Her mind is completely taken over, her body a husk. No one seems to take note of the loneliness she carries. Just some woman in the crowd, unaware that her top is undone". The complicated friendship between Su-ae and San is another subtle highlight of the novel. While Su-ae attempted to play the role of a "savior" to San, San is still unable to let go of her memories with Namae or her unhappy childhood. Violets is definitely a strong 4.5/5 star read to me. Through Violets, Kyung-Sook Shin offered a voice for women who are victims of the violators and the patriarch. Through Anton Hur's brilliant translation, such voice transcends beyond the Korean language and will be made known to more. Thanks to Feminist Press for sending a review copy to me!
Violin: Noun, a musical instrument. . . a player of, a violinist
Violence: Noun, a disturbance, disruption, destruction
Violator: Noun, one who breaks rules, invades, insults, rapes"
Violets follows the story of San, who grows up in a small rural community. Since young, San was neglected by her mother and rejected by her father. Not to mention that San's outsider status fortifies the villagers' discriminatory attitude towards her. She met Namae (whose father was an alcoholic) and both became good friends. One afternoon in a minari field, both San and Namae engaged in a moment of physical intimacy which led to Namae's rejection of San. Since then, Namae distanced herself from San. Around 15 years later, San arrived in central Seoul and found a job in a flower shop. She met Su-ae, another florist in the flower shop and both instantly became good friends and roommates. While working in the flower shop, San also met other customers, in particular, a sexually aggressive businessman and an attractive photographer. Navigating herself in the huge city of Seoul, can San finally free herself from the violent encounter with Namae, which resulted in her isolation and suppressed desire?
Last year, I've witnessed Katie Kitamura's quiet yet powerful writing via Intimacies. Violets sends out some Intimacies vibes but with Kyung-Sook Shin's distinctive voice. It is a subtle story about isolation, loneliness, desire, and more importantly, suppressed queer desire, which is very aptly described in an Asian setting. Shin's detailed observations of Seoul's landscape and atmosphere mirrored San's loneliness, awkwardness, and her attempts in assimilating with Seoul's city culture. Her obsession with the photographer and finally the businessman amplified her uncertainty vis-a-vis her sexuality and grapples with desire. Most of the male characters as incorporated by Shin in Violets indirectly depict the toxic masculinity, patriarchy which is deeply rooted in the Korean society. The treatment by a policeman and the businessman towards San in a few critical scenes highlighted how women could easily be violated by men and are constantly the prey of men. Shin's unapologetic depiction of the city's neglect towards a woman who was being violated sends a chill down my spine: "She's released into the street. Her mind is completely taken over, her body a husk. No one seems to take note of the loneliness she carries. Just some woman in the crowd, unaware that her top is undone". The complicated friendship between Su-ae and San is another subtle highlight of the novel. While Su-ae attempted to play the role of a "savior" to San, San is still unable to let go of her memories with Namae or her unhappy childhood. Violets is definitely a strong 4.5/5 star read to me. Through Violets, Kyung-Sook Shin offered a voice for women who are victims of the violators and the patriarch. Through Anton Hur's brilliant translation, such voice transcends beyond the Korean language and will be made known to more. Thanks to Feminist Press for sending a review copy to me!
April 22, 2022
My review for the Minneapolis Star Tribune: https://www.startribune.com/review-vi...
In 2012 with her novel "Please Look After Mom," Kyung-sook Shin became the first South Korean and the first woman ever to win the Man Asian Literary Prize. But her illustrious career began with the publication of her debut novella, "Winter Fable," in 1985, and over the past 35 years, she has become one of the most widely read and acclaimed writers in South Korea.
Thanks to the astute translation of Anton Hur and the independent publisher Feminist Press, English-speaking audiences now have the opportunity to read Shin's shattering and salient novel "Violets," originally published in Korean in 2001. In this slim and melancholy slow-burner of a book, Shin tells the story of San, a shy and solitary 22-year-old woman who stumbles into a job at a flower shop in 1990s-era Seoul.
Narrated in the present tense, the book has a dreamlike immediacy, especially in the opening chapter, "Where the Minari Grows," which illustrates San's abject girlhood in the countryside in the 1970s. Born to a beautiful mother who possesses "a poignant, tragic quality, shared by all women whose face, neck, waist and legs seem to flow in an unbroken line" and a rebellious father who abandons his family out of disappointment with the gender of his child, San grows up friendless save for Namae, a fellow pariah because of her own dead mother and drunken dad.
"The fact that they each have something to be ashamed of makes the two draw closer," Shin writes. "They are two stragglers from the herd."
But their friendship implodes under even more shame after the girls share an innocent moment of queer attraction, causing Namae to cut off her only friend. When we meet San again after her move to the big city, her solitude has become excruciating. As she goes to eat an unsatisfying meal in her tiny apartment, "she pulls up a legless chair, places it across from her, an adds a straw hat hanging on the wall" because "having the straw hat there makes her think she's sitting with someone."
The summer unfolds and San, a true outsider, struggles to find her place in a society that marginalizes people like her as a matter of course. She encounters a cast of indelible characters, including the mute shop owner, her winsome and assertive co-worker Su-ae — who becomes her roommate, eats mint chocolate chip ice cream for breakfast, and is not afraid to confront their pushy landlady — and the womanizing photographer who whips "her empty heart into a certain frenzy" with a careless and insincere expression of love.
In scenes saturated with feeling, Shin depicts a milieu bristling with classism and misogyny, dramatizing the desires and dreams of a protagonist who, in her own defenseless way, strives for both independence and connection. Shin writes in her Afterword that "Violets are very small plants. So small they're easily overlooked as weeds," but the care she gives to her telling of San's story argues that even the most vulnerable are worthy of respect.
In 2012 with her novel "Please Look After Mom," Kyung-sook Shin became the first South Korean and the first woman ever to win the Man Asian Literary Prize. But her illustrious career began with the publication of her debut novella, "Winter Fable," in 1985, and over the past 35 years, she has become one of the most widely read and acclaimed writers in South Korea.
Thanks to the astute translation of Anton Hur and the independent publisher Feminist Press, English-speaking audiences now have the opportunity to read Shin's shattering and salient novel "Violets," originally published in Korean in 2001. In this slim and melancholy slow-burner of a book, Shin tells the story of San, a shy and solitary 22-year-old woman who stumbles into a job at a flower shop in 1990s-era Seoul.
Narrated in the present tense, the book has a dreamlike immediacy, especially in the opening chapter, "Where the Minari Grows," which illustrates San's abject girlhood in the countryside in the 1970s. Born to a beautiful mother who possesses "a poignant, tragic quality, shared by all women whose face, neck, waist and legs seem to flow in an unbroken line" and a rebellious father who abandons his family out of disappointment with the gender of his child, San grows up friendless save for Namae, a fellow pariah because of her own dead mother and drunken dad.
"The fact that they each have something to be ashamed of makes the two draw closer," Shin writes. "They are two stragglers from the herd."
But their friendship implodes under even more shame after the girls share an innocent moment of queer attraction, causing Namae to cut off her only friend. When we meet San again after her move to the big city, her solitude has become excruciating. As she goes to eat an unsatisfying meal in her tiny apartment, "she pulls up a legless chair, places it across from her, an adds a straw hat hanging on the wall" because "having the straw hat there makes her think she's sitting with someone."
The summer unfolds and San, a true outsider, struggles to find her place in a society that marginalizes people like her as a matter of course. She encounters a cast of indelible characters, including the mute shop owner, her winsome and assertive co-worker Su-ae — who becomes her roommate, eats mint chocolate chip ice cream for breakfast, and is not afraid to confront their pushy landlady — and the womanizing photographer who whips "her empty heart into a certain frenzy" with a careless and insincere expression of love.
In scenes saturated with feeling, Shin depicts a milieu bristling with classism and misogyny, dramatizing the desires and dreams of a protagonist who, in her own defenseless way, strives for both independence and connection. Shin writes in her Afterword that "Violets are very small plants. So small they're easily overlooked as weeds," but the care she gives to her telling of San's story argues that even the most vulnerable are worthy of respect.
May 23, 2024
I have to give this book an almost perfect 5 stars - 4.8. Reasons because Im in loss on how to convey my thoughts on this book but also at the same time scared that Im showing one of the many layers of my own insecurity in this review 🥲
Violets by Kyung Sook Shin, in its quietude, portrays loneliness as a woman, as a girl, and as a person in a society with hope to be listened to and appreciated for our existence. This is for those who felt invisible and their drowned voices unheard. A book that resonates with me
Violets, violence, violators. Violets at its core is about loneliness & isolation. Its a silent screams for help & for ones whom struggled to float above, to be noticed and to be heard in the sea of people. Violets, a flower thats take time to care for, requires great effort to grow, wilted under harsh light and ones to be ignored once looked at. And thats precisely what Violets by Shin Kyung Sook is. Its a story of Oh San, a girl whom desired for love after a traumatic abandonment by her own mother, starved of affectionate love from her parents, the childhood love she had with another girl, Namae that get crushed instantly after that fateful summer in the Minari grass plains, the overwhelming desire to be loved brought up again by a confession from a man.
The desperateness & the sorrowful tone of San's thoughts is like looking through a mirror reflecting of a personal insecurity of mine. Its the quietude nature of the story, the hauntingly melancholic narrative, its the mundane day to day life of just living in the flow of the moment and the occassional insertions of San's own troubled thoughts make this such a heartbreaking read. As the author said in the afterword, this book is for those girl who felt like they are invisible, their anonymous existence in the society, the ordinariness of not standing out, this story is for those who crave for validation & appreciation, who for once want people to actually listen to them and please listen.
But also, its a story that doesnt gloss on the violence against women, the violation of privacy, boundaries, thoughts and of course the body. Violets' slow burn despair of desire for connection & love shrouded with intense hope burst to full blown violence by the end of the story putting an abrupt end to the passive standing
Thank u Definitely Books #pansing for the review copy in exchange for an honest review.
Violets by Kyung Sook Shin, in its quietude, portrays loneliness as a woman, as a girl, and as a person in a society with hope to be listened to and appreciated for our existence. This is for those who felt invisible and their drowned voices unheard. A book that resonates with me
Violets, violence, violators. Violets at its core is about loneliness & isolation. Its a silent screams for help & for ones whom struggled to float above, to be noticed and to be heard in the sea of people. Violets, a flower thats take time to care for, requires great effort to grow, wilted under harsh light and ones to be ignored once looked at. And thats precisely what Violets by Shin Kyung Sook is. Its a story of Oh San, a girl whom desired for love after a traumatic abandonment by her own mother, starved of affectionate love from her parents, the childhood love she had with another girl, Namae that get crushed instantly after that fateful summer in the Minari grass plains, the overwhelming desire to be loved brought up again by a confession from a man.
The desperateness & the sorrowful tone of San's thoughts is like looking through a mirror reflecting of a personal insecurity of mine. Its the quietude nature of the story, the hauntingly melancholic narrative, its the mundane day to day life of just living in the flow of the moment and the occassional insertions of San's own troubled thoughts make this such a heartbreaking read. As the author said in the afterword, this book is for those girl who felt like they are invisible, their anonymous existence in the society, the ordinariness of not standing out, this story is for those who crave for validation & appreciation, who for once want people to actually listen to them and please listen.
But also, its a story that doesnt gloss on the violence against women, the violation of privacy, boundaries, thoughts and of course the body. Violets' slow burn despair of desire for connection & love shrouded with intense hope burst to full blown violence by the end of the story putting an abrupt end to the passive standing
Thank u Definitely Books #pansing for the review copy in exchange for an honest review.
July 23, 2022
i genuinely enjoyed the first third of the book, as it reminded me a little of My Liberation Notes (a K-drama i like very much), but i got bored nearing the halfway mark of the book. so i don't really have a lot to say about this.
March 24, 2025
5 star writing and 2 Stars for the plot, so I guess it gets a 3. But the writing is beautiful, so I’m rounding up to 4.
That being said: THIS BOOK IS NOT SAPPHIC. Seriously, I’m so annoyed that I picked up a book that has me reading about a hetero crush for 30% of it. So annoying that people wrongly categorize books as lesbian when they are NOT.
That being said: THIS BOOK IS NOT SAPPHIC. Seriously, I’m so annoyed that I picked up a book that has me reading about a hetero crush for 30% of it. So annoying that people wrongly categorize books as lesbian when they are NOT.
May 27, 2024
I struggled to engage with this book until 65% in! For me, this book was a slow burner but the storyline and the authors intentions were clearer to grasp towards the end.
April 14, 2022
3.5*
firstly, a huge thank you to W&N books for sending me a proof copy of violets to review. i adore translated fiction and had heard so much buzz around this novel, i couldn't wait to sink my teeth into it. violets is a whimsical daze, stippled with stunning floral imagery amidst the increasingly isolated characterisation of the central protagonist. kyung-sook shin grapples with the delicate balance between prose and characterisation elegantly, however there are several elements that result in a novel that feels almost incomplete with the over-hanging promise of more to come.
initially we encounter the main character san in the 1970s. ostracised from her community at a tender age, indicative of the eventual estrangement from her mother as a young woman, she struggles to find friendship and comfort in her life. eventually, she seeks solace in namae, another outsider. yet after an awkward pass, their friendship is severed beyond repair. the novel shifts into san's adulthood, where she takes up work as a florist alongside su-nae. however, she cannot escape the trauma of her memories and the tragedy of her future.
to this day, i am still unsure if kyung-sook shin's detached writing style is a victim of translation or part of the charm of violets. despite feeling separated from san, i felt sympathetic to the majority of her actions recognising some of her traits in my own personality. one thing portrayed excellently throughout the novel, is how fully realised and utterly ordinary the characters feel. the novel reads almost like a fairytale, with a quaint narrative style that describes every detail with meticulous detail. unfortunately, some details felt stifling and certain actions became so repetitively highlighted, that the novel took on almost a humid atmosphere.
on the whole, the characters shine through even if i wish we saw more of namae and san's mother, who are arguably two of the most important pieces when examining the puzzle of san's characterisation. i adored the fanciful imagery and quirky tone throughout, yet in places the story felt laboured and poorly paced. as ever, my expectations were sky high and violets sadly did not quite meet them.
firstly, a huge thank you to W&N books for sending me a proof copy of violets to review. i adore translated fiction and had heard so much buzz around this novel, i couldn't wait to sink my teeth into it. violets is a whimsical daze, stippled with stunning floral imagery amidst the increasingly isolated characterisation of the central protagonist. kyung-sook shin grapples with the delicate balance between prose and characterisation elegantly, however there are several elements that result in a novel that feels almost incomplete with the over-hanging promise of more to come.
initially we encounter the main character san in the 1970s. ostracised from her community at a tender age, indicative of the eventual estrangement from her mother as a young woman, she struggles to find friendship and comfort in her life. eventually, she seeks solace in namae, another outsider. yet after an awkward pass, their friendship is severed beyond repair. the novel shifts into san's adulthood, where she takes up work as a florist alongside su-nae. however, she cannot escape the trauma of her memories and the tragedy of her future.
to this day, i am still unsure if kyung-sook shin's detached writing style is a victim of translation or part of the charm of violets. despite feeling separated from san, i felt sympathetic to the majority of her actions recognising some of her traits in my own personality. one thing portrayed excellently throughout the novel, is how fully realised and utterly ordinary the characters feel. the novel reads almost like a fairytale, with a quaint narrative style that describes every detail with meticulous detail. unfortunately, some details felt stifling and certain actions became so repetitively highlighted, that the novel took on almost a humid atmosphere.
on the whole, the characters shine through even if i wish we saw more of namae and san's mother, who are arguably two of the most important pieces when examining the puzzle of san's characterisation. i adored the fanciful imagery and quirky tone throughout, yet in places the story felt laboured and poorly paced. as ever, my expectations were sky high and violets sadly did not quite meet them.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 734 reviews