An emotional read. I enjoyed the gorgeous writing. A powerful narrative of self-reflection in early adulthood. The author's note at the end explained more context to the story and the title,

San is born into a rural 1970s South Korean household that was desperate for a son. An outsider from birth almost, she seeks solace in Namae who also sees themselves as a loner. But one awkward moments ruins their friendship forever forcing an adult, present day San, to question her feelings and place in the world.

This was a very slow, heavily character driven story that's told in an almost detached way. On some level this is a perfect reflection of who San is. She's an individual who has been abandoned from a young age and forced to fend for herself, to hide her emotions and live on the outskirts of society. She's never been wanted, and because of this she has very little self worth. It's not a light read, delving deep into San's ideas about love and the emotional turmoil she frequently has due to her inability to bond with people.

Not much in the way of plot, but still quite a viceral and raw experience to read about.

South Korea in the 1970s and two little girls forge an intense friendship. San and Namae are inseparable until something triggers a reaction in Namae and she violently rejects San. Deeply traumatised by this rejection, and with the added trauma of her mother abandoning her, San goes on to become a deeply troubled young woman who struggles to make sense of the world and the people around her. Gradually her mental state becomes more and more unstable. Her disintegration is empathetically portrayed with great insight and the book is a vivid portrayal of mental illness. Sad and moving.

The synopsis of this book made it sound right up my alley but I just couldn't get into it at all. I don't know if it was the writing style or the characters but I just didn't enjoy it personally. Think it was a me thing!

Review not posted anywhere else.

I struggled to read this at times, not because it’s badly written but because it’s softly-spoken with an air of misfortune in the slice-of-life unfolding of Oh San’s life.

It begins with her childhood and goes on past a big event, arguably smaller than the one which makes her and her mother leave the village; but that is the point and how the novel continues. Things that might not be big are and vice versa. She next appears hoping to be a word processor and living near a diplomat’s home, so it’s relatively safe and she’s trying to make something of herself after leaving the hair salon. Which is when she starts working at the flower shop and sometimes things are better and sometimes they are worse. Maybe it’s an everyday melancholy.

‘Violets’ is the perfect title given the motif, the refrain from shrinking violet to violence and the way language and memory twist. It began with minari flowers and becomes all flowers to centre on violets. The translation is done well as the intonation is suitably distancing and in the present, slipping between this-then-this, presence and absence…

The loneliness of the characters is pervasive and the portrayal of society may have dated (originally published in 2001) with phone booths all too much in the attitudes and the way of living quietly is unchanged.

I can’t say I loved this book, I kept waiting for the sword of Damocles to fall but I appreciated very much what it was trying to say and the way in which it did so. San has an overwhelming …passion(? Can we call it that?) which she does not act upon in a world in which as she herself points of is different for women than for men - a disappearing statement, much like San herself. This is being billed as feminist and it quietly is, no rebellion called for, merely the portrayal of a young woman living a lonely existence in the city - even when another young woman, in some ways her polar opposite comes into her life. Sometimes existing is hard enough.

With thanks to NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

The invisible life of Oh San.
Violets tells the story of Oh San. Shunned from birth for being a girl by her father, the first part of the story starts off with a young Oh San who has somewhat of an intimate encounter with her friend Namae, who then later shuns her.
Fast forward to years later where Oh San has moved to Seoul. She is estranged from her mother and lives a life of solitude. After quitting her job as a hairdresser, she comes across a flower shop where the mute owner is in need of a worker, so Oh San takes up the job there. Su-ae also works at the flower shop and the two become inseparable. Su-ae helps navigate San through life, until mental illness consumes San and she spirals downwards into a deep abyss of her thoughts and loneliness.
I thought that Violets, although complex, was written beautifully. Shin Kyung Sook nailed San's character by bringing out her vulnerability, naivety and how she viewed the world through San's thoughts.

This book deals with some hardhitting issues that could be triggering, however, I felt that they were handled sensitively and empathetically by the author, so I was not put off by it. The book is well written, with well developed charcaters and with a compelling, if not sometimes hard to read storyline that really looks at the trials and tribulations of being a woman of working class in South Korea in the 1970's.
This was a heartwrencing, emotive read and I really liked it but it won't be for everyone.

I’m not really sure what I expected of this book but by the end it was nothing like I expected at all!

I didn’t love the opening chapters of San’s childhood so I was relieved to find these weren’t the focus for the whole book. I’m glad I preserved.

This is a quiet, lonely book. It’s very much a book with a real mood, and every moment feels like a metaphor. It’s not complex in plot but it’s still compelling to follow.

I almost wanted more but I don’t think that was the point.

One to digest and contemplate. 3.5 stars

"Violets" by Shin Kyung-sook is, alongside "The Vegetarian" by Han Kang or "Kim Ji-young, Born 1982" by Nam-joo Cho, a work of literature that explores the subject of being a working class woman in the South Korean society, translated to English. The transcreation by Anton Hur is masterful and well-styled, and thanks to such talented translators we are able to get to know the literary works of authors, who otherwise would remain unknown for people who don't speak the language of the original.

"Violets" are not a quick or easy read, as the book explores such topics as childhood trauma of abandonment, sexual violence, repressed desires and systemic violence against women. All these are experiences of San, a young girl, then a woman, who makes her way from a small village to a large city, encountering different types of people, some of whom are not treating her well, to put it mildly.

San's not only creating these new connections but also holds on to some old ones, one of them being Namae, with whom San shared a moment of sexual awakening, the other--San's estranged mother who is trying to reconnect with the daughter she abandoned.

It is admirable how Shin Kyung-sook can grasp the intricacies of the aftermath of traumatic experiences, as well as her awareness of what may happen if they're not properly addressed.

I quite enjoyed this book, despite the tough topic of loneliness and moody vibe!
It was really interesting to see how the protagonist found a way of grounding herself and a sense of relief in working with plants. I also really enjoyed the brief screenshots of Korean life. I found it interesting that the author conveyed the protagonist's low moods through a 'foggy' style, even though that made the book difficult to follow at times. I am just hoping to see more Korean books in translation in the future!

This book was beautiful. It tells the story of San and explores themes of repression, loneliness, isolation, class and autonomy all while providing a sympathetic and picturesque narrative. San is haunted when she finds work at a flower shop. Her difficult upbringing contained an unreliable and disappointing mother, an absent father, and a childhood friend who turned her back on her after a romantic encounter between the two of them. The flower shop was hardly her dream profession but it provides a backdrop for dramatic changes to her life as she tries to figure out what she wants and who she is, but nothing is ever simple and the ties that bind leave their mark even when we try to forge a new path.
I really enjoyed this book as I found it incredibly human and introspective although definitely, at times, the choices San made seemed to come out of left field. The way Shin depicts obsession or hyper-fixation as a coping mechanism is really interesting as is the way she depicts relationships with others. Definitely worth checking out.

Compared to the author's previous works Violets is a bit more vague. The 'inciting' event was a bit too dramatic, and the narrative has this dreary pace that made it really hard to 'get into' the story. Still, if you don't mind depressive and very introspective narratives that explore themes like loneliness and longing you should give this a shot.

Violets is something of a shapeshifter of a novel, an unpredictable, slow-burning character study. Although this is a new translation, it's actually one of Shin Kyung-sook's earlier works, written before Please Look After Mother and I'll Be Right There. It doesn't have quite the same sophistication as her later works (for instance, Oh San feels more like an allegorical character than a real person), but you can definitely see her lyrical prose and exploration of themes such as memory and belonging take root.

First of all I would like to thank the publisher Orion (W&G) and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

The book tells the story of San, a troubled 23 year old, who is struggling to be happy and thrive in an increasingly complex and modern Seoul, while trying to disentangle early childhood trauma. It is a psychological profile of loneliness, dealing with how difficult it is to communicate even if all the tools of communication are available. It is also a sociological profile of Korea, as it is the story of young Korean women, who get lost in a chauvinistic society that barely knows they exist.

Overall I liked the the book, and learned a lot from it. Having finished it I know that a part of it will live on in my consciousness. I come away knowing a little bit more about South Korea, about the issues women there deal with, and about smiles that can hide a black hole of loss and insecurity.

The writing was well paced and energetic. You never knew where the story would take you, as the plot revolves, in reality, around the psyche of the main character. As such, the twists and turns were exciting, unpredictable, and captivating. It was a difficult book to let go, especially in the last third.

I found the language to be a bit inconsistent. Some parts were just lyrical and magical (especially a few of the paragraphs from San's notebook). Others were just fine. Nothing wrong in this, but it's clear that the author has unique talent, which hasn't been equally applied (perhaps?) in the different parts of the narrative.

The ending (without any spoilers) left me dumbfounded. It's such a departure in style and energy from the rest of the story that it feels like an uppercut punch. In many ways it was the ending that made me like the book even more - it required boldness and courage in storytelling.

This was the first book I read by this author, but I will for sure look for others. In some ways in reminds me of Banana Yoshimoto, and in others - Sally Rooney. Can't wait to read more of the author's work, though perhaps after a break to settle my emotions...

I for one am really excited by all of the east Asian fiction appearing in translation in English in the last couple of years, and Violets is an excellent addition to the canon. Written in 2001 - but it reads as if it was written today - it follows Shin Kyung-sook's 2009 novel Please Look After Mother, published in English translation in 2011 (which I also enjoyed greatly).

Violets is more character than plot driven, following Oh San, a young woman from rural Korea. She is a loner as a child until she befriends another young girl named Namae. It's difficult to put it better than the blurb does: "Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation."

Fast-forward to San moving to Seoul aged 22, where she gets a job in a flower shop and becomes friends with her only colleague, Su-ae. From here her life begins to change somewhat, but her encounter with Namae lingers in her mind and seems to shape her life and later decisions.

Violets is a slippery beast in some ways, defying categorisation -- just when you think the story is going one way it goes in a different direction (this sounds like there are ridiculous plot twists but that's not the case at all), and the ending in particular took me somewhat by surprise. The story is meandering but in a good way, showing the loneliness and thwarted desire of one young woman which could be said to be representative of many city dwellers (and many Koreans if the other characters are anything to go by). This was - in some very loosely related way - what I wanted Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 to be, and I can only recommend it highly.

This is a beautifully written book that captivated me immediately. There is something quite unusual about the style of writing but this only served to heighten the atmosphere, especially in the later part of the book where the mood darkened.
This isn’t a book in which much happened; it was driven purely by the strength of the main character, San. Although beautiful in many of its descriptions, there were some quite tough themes at work in the book. I’m going to be left thinking about this book got a long time.

Violets is a novel about a young woman who moved from the countryside to Seoul, but lives an almost invisible life. San grew up in rural South Korea, where a moment with her friend Namae led Namae to reject her. Now twenty-two, San lives in the city and starts working at a flower shop whilst unable to get a word processing job. There she meets Su-ae, the shop owner's niece and other employee, and they become friends, dealing with customers like a pest of a businessman and a photographer that San becomes obsessed with, but despite San's quiet exterior, underneath desire and repression linger.

This book did not go where I expected it to, turning into a darker and more surreal book nearer the end, and it was interesting to see it defy any expectations I might've had, though the ending is very depressing. I've not read any of the author's other books, though I found out afterwards that this is an earlier book now translated after the success of her other books in translation, so that might've been why I didn't have any expectations other than from the blurb and how the novel began. The imagery in Violets is very memorable, with it feeling like a very visual novel that you really picture whilst reading, and it is more about the imagery and characters than any particular plot, other than the ending. The contrast between the pace of most of the book, which is quite dreamlike and understated, even slow at times, and the sudden violent ending, are a shock that feels powerful, reflecting some of the novel's themes of invisibility, repression, and violence.

A book that benefits from reflection once you finish reading it, Violets explores a character using vivid detail, with an almost unsettling sense of watching her when other people don't notice her. A lingering kind of a book.

If you are looking for a book with beautiful prose and do not really mind a slow and perhaps inexistent dark-ishplot, this is your book.

The first chapters of Violets follow Oh San's tragic past with a dysfunctional family and a strange (perhaps even traumatic) event between herself and her friend Namae. Then, the book flash-forwards 15 years into the future to show us San finding a new job at a flower shop while living in Seoul by herself. The bookshop broadens her world to a new set of people and flowers and we, as readers, get to see how she struggles through this new world with all its social interactions as a quiet individual who prefers isolation.

When I started reading this book, I did not know what to expect. I think there was a moment in the book where I stopped reading and I just took a second to re-track all that San had gone through, suddenly understanding where we were going and what Violets was. Since the book was tagged as LGBTQ, I thought it would go in one direction and I am still pleased that it caught me by surprise, however dark and unfortunate the actual direction.

Now, the book in itself was something that threw me into a reading slump. I dreaded coming to it but, when I read it, I did not dislike it. I just felt it was plotless but lacked the comfy feeling of the slice of life genre. Violets felt like a character study of San who had lived things bigger than herself and could only give them up or run away from them. It felt almost voyeuristic to see her stuck in a place for a while and suffering through experiences and activities that did not come to her naturally. Overall, I just did not feel "right" while reading it. I felt similarly to Please Look After Mom by the same author - everything feels wrong and I just don't care about any of it. At this point, I think I may just not like Shin Kyung-sook's stuff (though I do have to say her writing is beautiful and Anton Hur's translation is, as always, top-notch).

Will I give Shin Kyung-sook another chance? Probably not. It has taken me a whole month to read this short book and being done with it felt like such an accomplishment. But hey, I have tried to read this to redeem Shin from Please Look After Mom (which I hated) and I appreciated what Violets did. In my heart, it's a 2/3 stars, but I cannot justify giving it that with what it accomplishes and the gorgeous writing.

“Violet: Noun, a plant, a swallow flower . . . purple, the color, also used to describe . . . an oversensitive person, a shy person (“shrinking violet”) 
Violin: Noun, a musical instrument. . . a player of, a violinist 
Violence: Noun, a disturbance, disruption, destruction
Violator: Noun, one who breaks rules, invades, insults, rapes”

Violets is Anton Hur’s translation of the novel 바이올렛 by 신경숙 (and great to see the original title in 한글 as well as the translator’s name on the cover).

The author, whose name is Romanised as
Shin Kyung-sook, came to prominence in English with the bestselling Please Look After Mom, Chi-Young Kim’s translation of her 2009 novel 엄마를 부탁해, and which won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012. This is from an earlier (2001) novel in the original.

Anton Hur, part of the Smoking Tigers Collective, is increasingly becoming a leading translator from Korean, this I believe his 7th book, and the 4th I have read (the previous three Love in the Big City, Cursed Bunny and The Underground Village).

The novel, narrated in the present tense  opens in the countryside in a chapter titled Where the Minari Grows (a plant that, post the 2021 Oscars, needs less introduction to Western readers than had the novel been translated earlier);

“One day in July, rain pours from the skies. In a house with shut doors, a mother closes her eyes as the baby’s grandmother offers her the newborn. The mother knows what will happen now. An uncelebrated girl. The infant accepts her mother’s closed eyes in lieu of a loving caress, perhaps having intuited her fate from the womb, and does not bother crying. The sound of the monsoon fills the house. Underneath the porch, a dog curls its legs into itself. Can the baby hear the sound of the rain? She’s about to fall asleep in her grandmother’s hands. That same night, her father gives his daughter’s face only a cursory glance.“

The baby is Oh San, the focus of the novel.  San has a troubled and lonely childhood, her father rejecting her mother for another woman able to give him a son, and her mother then suffering a range of short-lived and ill-fated affairs.

She has one childhood friend, Namae whose father was a drunk and this first part of the novel revolves around a incident in the village minari field when the girls are around 9, one which for San binds their relationship but for Namae violates it.

“Little San had felt, I will love you more than myself. Namae had felt, This is the end of the oath we made on the grave. She had said goodbye to San forever.“

The main part of the novel is set in central Seoul almost 15 years later, with San turning 23 and arriving alone in the city, having broken off contact with her mother.  Trying but failing to find work as a proofsetter she chances across a help-wanted advert in a flower shop (the accurate and detailed, at times street-by-street and building-by-building, evocation of Seoul's rapidly changing cityscape one of the novel's signatures):

“This flower shop is an unexpected oasis. It faces the parking lot of Seoul’s Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, acting as a brief respite from the busy noise of surrounding traffic. A conveyor-belt sushi restaurant serving twin pieces of sushi or egg rolls on each plate, a Paris Baguette bakery franchise, a kimbap place barely squeezing in three tables, a stone-bowl rice shop, a 24-hour convenience store, a foreign language cram school, a stationery shop, a store specializing in photo albums, a bookstore kiosk set up between buildings, a new Mediterranean-style pasta place, a café named Spring Summer Autumn Winter— and amidst all these stores is a flower shop of considerable size, looking somewhat out of place, almost cinematic.”

Taking the role she forms a strong bond with her co-worker, and soon roommate, Lee Su-ae.  The flower shop offers her a refuge from her thoughts but her emotions are triggered by two incidents:

An incident with Su-as which brings back memories of the incident in the minari field:

“Back then, there was a minari field. An irrigation ditch where clear water flowed. A dyke they dried their wet clothes on. A girl whose father would get drunk and crawl into a jar to sing. A small white back, and a green spot like a grass stain. Black pupils. Braided hair sitting on delicate shoulders. Thin cheeks splashed with water.”

And a visit to the shop from a magazine photographer asked to illustrate a story on violets that leads to an infatuation:

“Violets. They bloom everywhere, making them seem more like weeds than proper flowers. San takes a closer look at them. Their little green leaves are small, their purple blossoms tiny. Before she came to the flower shop, she knew them as swallow flowers. Memories of entangling two swallow flower stems together and pulling them apart— one side was bound to snap. Whoever’s stem didn’t was the winner. She forgot what the prizes were, but she’d played the game many times. They did it with broadleaf plantains; they did it with foxtails. 

The man keeps pressing the shutter and mumbling something discontentedly. “What’s so pretty about these flowers? Such nonsense.” His disappointment is so palpable, it makes her apologetic.”

Overall, a powerful tale of loneliness, repressed desire, obsession and misogyny.  Often when a translated novel breaks through in the Anglosphere and the author's earlier novels are translated, they don't love up to the same standard.  Here, although less commercial, this was to me a stronger novel than Please Take Care of Mom and very much recommended.  

“The streets keep changing as if to erase every trace of her. There’s a new parking lot near Gyeonghuimun, and a new marinated crab restaurant called Mir in the next alley. Café Bonjour has changed its sign, declaring itself a restaurant, and in the Hengeuk Life Insurance building, an art cinema called Cinecube has opened. On its ground floor is a new French restaurant called Russian. The building has a little fountain as well as wooden benches and a small grove of bamboo. Next to the art museum, where the ravenous excavator used to be, ready to destroy all and everything, is a new building. This building, with its countless windows, now blocks the view of the taps where San gathered water in plastic bottles. It is impossible to tell where exactly San planted her white , yellow , purple and pink violets. An embattled-looking conscript on leave is standing at a stationery street vendor, choosing a new notebook. A middle-aged man drops a ₩ 10,000 note into a Salvation Army kettle. From the cinema on the street to Jeong-dong leading to Pauline Books and Changdeok Girls’ Middle School, youths are pouring out under the darkening sky. A young woman who has lost her party is looking around as the lights blink on one by one. San is no longer on these streets.“

Violets devastated me. This was such a beautiful book full of despair. The novel is slow-paced and poetic and is a love letter to 'invisible' women everywhere. I am so glad this book is now available in an English-language version. I will be buying this book for friends and family alike and singing its praises to anyone who will listen.