Jiyoung, like Gregor Samsa, feels so overwhelmed by social expectations that there is no room for her in her own body her only option is to become something - or someone - else.Ĭho Nam-joo’s third novel has been hailed as giving voice to the unheard everywoman. This novel is about the banality of the evil that is systemic misogyny. But then, my experiences are ordinary, as ordinary as the everyday horrors suffered by the book’s protagonist, Jiyoung. laid bare my own Korean childhood - and, let’s face it, my Western adulthood too - forcing me to confront traumatic experiences that I’d tried to chalk up as nothing out of the ordinary. The new, often subversive novels by Korean women, which have intersected with the rise of the #MeToo movement, are driving discussions beyond the literary world. Like Bong Joon Ho’s Academy Award-winning film Parasite, which unleashed a debate about class disparities in South Korea, Cho’s novel was treated as a social treatise as much as a work of art. When Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, was published in Korea in 2016, it was received as a cultural call to arms. But can her psychiatrist cure her, or even discover what truly ails her? “A social treatise as well as a work of art” (Alexandra Alter, New York Times), Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 heralds the arrival of international powerhouse Cho Nam-Joo.Ĭho’s clinical prose is bolstered with figures and footnotes to illustrate how ordinary Jiyoung’s experience is. Jiyoung narrates her story to this doctor-from her birth to parents who expected a son to elementary school teachers who policed girls’ outfits to male coworkers who installed hidden cameras in women’s restrooms. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her concerned husband sends her to a psychiatrist.
But strange symptoms appear: Jiyoung begins to impersonate the voices of other women, dead and alive. In a tidy apartment on the outskirts of Seoul, millennial “everywoman” Kim Jiyoung spends her days caring for her infant daughter. One of the most notable novels of the year, hailed by both critics and K-pop stars alike, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rampant misogyny.
A New York Times Editors Choice SelectionĪ global sensation, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 “has become.a touchstone for a conversation around feminism and gender” (Sarah Shin, Guardian).
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