…The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness includes many flashbacks, even as the main narrative is set in the present. Shin's treatment of time could have been disconcerting—the flashbacks could become wearisome, but they don't, illustrating instead the narrator's trauma. Shin is adept with differentiating time shifts, writing, as she puts it, "the past in present tense; the present in past tense." That pragmatic decision also plays out on a figurative level: The narrator has spent her whole life trying not to remember, and in doing so, the past is present in everything…In The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, Shin writes about a time and setting that might seem remote to many Americans, but in many ways her specificity is universal; we all have a monster that has no face, and which we try to avoid. Shin paints her own monster for us.
The New York Times Book Review - Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
Haunting. The novel's language, so formal in its simplicity, bestows a grace and solemnity.
A moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood.
The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel in translation I’ve read in many seasons. Every sentence is saturated in detail.
Shin writes about a time and setting that may seem remote to many Americans, but in many ways her specificity is universal; we all have a monster that has no face, and which we try to avoid. Shin paints her own monster for us.
New York Times Book Review
In The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness , Shin opens her nation's transition and her people's struggle to the world that looked away for all those years. Please Look After Mom , Ms. Shin's poignant examination of how Korea's evolution has impacted the different generations, gave birth to these other translations. But her later works are still more profound. While South Korea is but a whisper of its former self, Ms. Shin's writing grabs hold of those memories and brings them loudly to the surface.
The tone is as dreary as its topic, but it is a fictional account of what absolutely must be told and known. Intense but revealing historical fiction that the author calls something between ‘not quite fact, not quite fiction.’
Historical Novels Society
Haunting. The novel’s language, so formal in its simplicity, bestows a grace and solemnity.
Intimate and hauntingly spare. A raw tribute.
The New York Times Book Review
Kyung-sook Shin's work often inhabits the space between story and reality. Though the autobiographical novel is a well-worn genre, Shin handles it with the sort of effortless ruthlessness a story like this requires, without letting either the narrator or the reader rest easy about the line between truth and fiction. It's no wonder that despite being grounded in signposts of the everyday, The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness has the tenor of a ghost story. Shin anchors her narrator in vivid details rather than narrative absolutes. A haunting, remarkable novel.
Affecting.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
★ 10/15/2015
This audiobook, called one of the most important Korean novels of the last decade, is now available to an English audience. Narrator Emily Woo Zeller establishes a mournful tone for an unusual coming-of-age story about a Korean girl who goes from being an assembly line worker to a novelist. Most of her story is told in soft, almost meditative, tones as listeners follow her journey from her village, and a family that can no longer afford to raise her, into the city. Zeller embodies the somber mood of this period in Korean history through her precise pace and low pitch. She captures a generation of young people who worked in factories, pulling the Korean economy back to life after the war. M.R. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
2015-07-01
