Month: May 2022

I thought I’d bring you up to date on the books I’ve recently read.

Juhea Kim’s debut novel, Beasts of a Little Land, covers a lot of Korean history but also leaves out a lot. It starts in 1917 when a hunter, Nam KyungSoo stalks a leopard in the far north, hoping to feed his family. It turns out to be a tigerling, though, whose mother becomes a mortal threat. Starving and freezing, he is discovered by Japanese occupiers and he is able both to guide them to safety and protect them from the tiger. In return, the invaders allow him to live and the leader of the Japanese gives him a silver cigarette case.

At about the same time, another family, living near Pyongyang, decides they have too many mouths to feed and sell their 10-year old daughter, Jade, to a brothel in Pyongyang. She befriends the two daughters of the brothel’s owner and shortly the three of them move south to Seoul to begin training as courtesans.

Another new resident of Seoul is Nam JungHo, living on the street and carrying his father’s cigarette case. He meets Jade on the street and the two of them form a deep friendship and JungHo becomes involved in the revolutionary battle while Jade becomes a sought-after performer.

There are plenty of other characters as the fight between the communists, the nationalists and the occupying Japanese proceeds and lots of adventure. Mysteriously missing is the whole Korean war period which, I suspect, will come in a second novel.

It’s an often fun read but a bit too soapy for my tastes. I am looking forward to see what comes next from Kim, though.

I’m not normally a fan of mystery novels or thrillers, but thought I’d give this one a try after hearing good things about it.

A former FBI agent, settling down with her hunky judge husband, smells a rat at her weekly lunch group. When she met widowed hunk Josh, a top lawyer–turned–federal judge, and his now-14-year-old daughter, Eliza, Corie Geller thought she knew what she wanted. Instead of flying around the world interrogating terrorists for the government, she would marry Josh, become a wife and mother, and use her language skills to vet books in Arabic for U.S. publishers. That’s how she landed at La Cuisine Délicieuse in Shorehaven, Long Island, lunching every Wednesday with the suburban self-employed. A landscaper, an eBay reseller, a low-end speechwriter, a photo retoucher, an internet data expert…but there’s one guy in the group who sets off her internal alarms. Pete Delaney sits in the same chair every week, won’t take his eyes off his car, keeps changing phones—it’s just weird.

Corie intuitively feels that Pete is hiding something—and as someone accustomed to keeping her FBI past from her new neighbors, she should know. But does Pete really have a shady alternate life, or is Corie just imagining things, desperate to add some spark to her humdrum suburban existence? The only way to find out is to dust off her FBI toolkit and take a deep dive into Pete Delaney’s affairs . . .

It goes pretty much the way you would expect it to – Corie gets in deeper and deeper and then gets caught and captured by Pete Delaney and is saved at the last minute. There are some fun wisecracks and clever dialogue, but the characters are pretty much sketched in and the premise is contrived. I will pass on any more by Susan Isaacs.

It took me two tries to get into this book, but when I did, I loved it. The Promise is the story of the Swart family, descendants of Voortrekker settlers, clinging to their farm amid tumultuous social and political change — “just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans,” he writes, “holding on, holding out.” Their farm is just like every farm around it. The tone of the book is strange, sometimes doleful, other times mirthful. Beginning in 1986, the novel moves toward the present, following Ma, Pa and the alliterative trio of Swart children: Anton, a military deserter and failed novelist; Astrid, a narcissistic housewife; and Amor, an introspective loner who eventually becomes a nurse. By the end of the book, Amor will be the only one left alive.

Starting with the accession of Nelson Mandela, the novel registers seismic rumbles of a changing South Africa. Yet white characters remain casually dismissive of Black people and their “unknowable lives”; everyone, Astrid muses, “just went on like before, except it was nicer because there was forgiveness and no more boycotts.”

Everything is written in the present tense and the narrator constantly changes viewpoints; scenes meld into one another without notice. Sometimes the characters reach out and correct the narrator, other times the narrator addresses the reader directly (“if Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked”). The narrator sometimes tells us what everyone in the room is thinking and it isn’t pretty.

Each of The Promise’s four sections centers around the death of a different Swart. They’re also set in defining eras of South African politics, from the State of Emergency to Mandela’s presidency, Mbeki’s inauguration and Jacob Zuma’s eventual resignation. The romp through South Africa’s sordid past is a bizarre one, populated by impossible coincidences and brutal violence, with a chorus of odd supporting characters: a case of snakes, an incestuous priest, a yoga teacher called Mowgli, an evil reptile park salesman. 

The book is filled with satire and Galgut does a great job of leading us through the collapse of the old South Africa without guessing what will arise from the ashes. The novel was a well-deserved Booker Prize winner and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. You should read it.