Muristek
In this atmospheric and gripping fable set in 70s Korea, a fragile young florist dedicates herself to flowers
“Violet, Violin, Violence, Violator,” San reads in an English-to-Korean dictionary in Kyung-sook Shin’s newly translated 2001 novel, Violets. Within a few lines the dictionary goes from the beautiful flowers to “one who breaks rules, invades, insults, rapes”. Violets is a novel built on the proximity of beauty and violence.
Shin became known in the west with her 2011 novel Please Look After Mother, which sold 2m copies and won the Man Asian literary prize. In that book a grandmother disappears after a lifetime of serving others, and Shin said she wanted to explore the values that had gone missing “as we turned to modernity”. There were multiple viewpoints, of people in their 40s and older. In Violets, Shin homes in on the single perspective of San in adolescence and her early 20s. The novel is set in 1970s South Korea, an era in which violence and repression were endemic. We don’t see any large-scale social unrest; instead Shin finds indirect and nuanced ways to conjure the atmosphere of a place where flourishing is thwarted at every turn.
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