Korean Book Review: The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness

The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness is the next work translated into English by popular female author, Kyung Sook-shin. It’s a semi-autobiographical work and similar points also crop up in her successful novel Please Look After Mom. 

The protagonist is a successful writer in her 30s. As in Please Look After Mom, her mother is illiterate and so can’t read her books. Here she reflects back to her youth when she was a poor teenager working in a factory in Seoul. At that time, she lived with family members in cramped conditions where everyone struggled to make ends meet.

Korea in the 70s and 80s

I was interested in the setting of the story which covers the 70s and 80s when times were hard. The country was under a military dictatorship and the people felt the pressure of industrialisation. Just like the writer, many workers moved from the countryside to the capital’s factories. I felt angry reading about the life of the factory workers who were treated poorly and had very few rights.

see the novel The Dwarf for more on this. 

A good chunk of the story deals with the terrible and often violent struggles the workers had with management as they tried to make a union. And major political events come up in the story too, such as the Gwangju uprising of 1980. Hundreds of pro-democracy student protesters were killed by police.

The great film A Taxi Driver is set around the Gwangju uprising. 

Although now a successful author, the protagonist is full of angst and still riddled with thoughts from the past.

A memorable autobiography

The problem that I had with Please Look After Mom, namely the same sombre tone throughout, occurs here too.

And some decisions with the translation bothered me as well – such as how the characters should be addressed in English.

There are so many challenges translating Korean into English. So even just simple things such as how the characters address each other raises all sorts of problems! In this translation of The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness,  the titles have been literally translated. so for instance, there is ‘Older Brother’ and ‘Cousin’.

I found this a bit unnatural in English. And would prefer to keep as much of the flavour of the original language as possible. To me, ‘Oppa‘ would sound more convincing than ‘Older Brother’. But that’s my personal taste.

Overall, I thought this was another unusual and emotional work by Kyung Sook-shin. A memorable autobiography and dramatic history.

Read more Korean book and film reviews

The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness is available from Amazon