Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko, in an apartment in an abandoned hotel, and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris and listening to the sounds from the street above.
Women’s calves, men’s shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. Couldn’t find a recipe but you can watch it being made here.Īs part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter.The days are beginning to draw in. Sunja makes pumpkin taffy, known as Hobakyeot. I received my copy of Pachinko from the publisher, Harper Collins Australia, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. If you’re after a longish family sage (496 pages) with an interesting historical context, Pachinko should hit the mark. And is there such a thing as inter-generational shame at the broadest level, as there is inter-generational trauma? And what is the opposite of shame? Pride? (There’s plenty of that in Pachinko as well). Did mothers fail by not telling their sons that suffering would come?Īnd some of the things I wondered – do we ever ‘get over’ shame? (My sense is that it is the bedrock, and rarely do we drill through all that we’re feeling and really, truly examine the bedrock). Should she have taught her son to suffer the humiliation that she’d drunk like water? …. She had suffered to create a better life for Noa, and yet it was not enough. Can shame be explored delicately, or is it by nature, blunt? Although it begins with an ‘obvious’ shame – an unwed mother – Lee weaves wisps of shame into so many scenes – a hare lip school lunches that are hidden because of the stink of kimchi and a boy dropping letters from his name to conceal its Korean-ness. This story, which is focused on the lives of a Korean family who moves to Japan, examines shame at many levels – personal, cultural, historical – without labeling it directly. So, without a bunch of marked passages to put to music, and without writing a full review, I will share the single thing that stood out – shame. But there will be no mixtape, for the simple reason that although I found this family saga engrossing in terms of plot, there was nothing particularly compelling about the style of Lee’s writing. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee has 266,391 ratings and 26,202 reviews on Goodreads.
Because really, what more can I say about a text if 20,000 others have shared their thoughts? Conversely, there’s always an audience for eighties music videos paired with some choice quotes (I think). Ordinarily, if a book I’ve read has thousands of reviews on Goodreads, I’ll do a literary mixtape instead of a review.
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