Brilliant and exceptional writing with a touch of magical realism. Shocking and enjoyable throughout the whole book.

I tried to persevere but this book wasn't to my taste. There were nuggets of wisdom which left a mark but overall I wasn't invested in the story or the characters much. It was too crude for me to continue. I am not sure if it was the translation but the writing style didn't appeal to me. That's a shame because I like to read translated fiction.

Thanks to the publishers for my ARC.

I love multigenerational stories and stories drawing on folklore and magical realism and the like, so this one I thoroughly appreciated! Capturing Korean history and the journeys and struggles of its characters across a changing period, it didn’t always make for pleasant reading but was a story that impressed itself upon me all the same.

A crude and grotesque satire told through an adventure novel that charts the life of Geumbok and her daughter, Chunhui, as they live in a rapidly changing Korea. Taking place in a small town, Pyeongdae, in a remote mountain region of Korea, we see the fortunes of the town transform from post-colonial wasteland into a rapidly growing capitalist society. The thing that must be addressed in any review is the overabundance of horrible violence perpetrated upon characters on page after page. The absurdity and exaggerated effect brought on by the satirical nature of the book helps alleviate some of the discomfort with the exploitative violence but it does needed to be noted. As the story progresses, little absurdities and small bits of magical realism dot the page. I found the first three quarters of the book to be much better than the final quarter. Geumbok's transition to a man is never delved into satisfactorily and at best I can tell was being used to comment on toxic masculinity? Regardless, it took the character with the most interiority and made them into a closed-off box. I think the book suffers for it. The final quarter chronicling Chunhui's life presents her as a mute simpleton being continuously beat, tortured and pushed further down in life. It was hard to read and the payoff with the bricks didn't redeem what we were put through to get there.

I really appreciated the writing style here, I really liked the way this author writes and I would certainly read more, however how they write women just sits a little uncomfortable with me (especially that story near the beginning about the 'ugly woman' and what she does to the 'half-wit' is wrong on so many levels).

There is a certainly a great interconnection between stories and I really appreciate how the stories create a perspective of Korea that is a little dark but sparks up with a little magic in moments that makes for captivating reading. I do totally understand why it was longlisted for the Booker Prize this year - kudos to the translator who really captured the style of the author, I feel in this book.

I was really looking forward to reading this book, especially since I'm a big fan of translated fiction. However, to my disappointment, I found myself feeling quite let down as I read through it. It's definitely a unique piece of literature that combines elements of magical realism, which I usually enjoy. But unfortunately, it also includes a significant amount of sexual violence and misogyny that I felt was just too much. I ended up not being able to finish the entire book and instead chose to skim through the last 30 percent.

I picked up WHALE after it was nominated for the International Booker Prize, and I was pleased to see that it made it to the shortlist - a well-deserved honor. WHALE is a Korean generational epic, a tale spun with magic realism, telling the tale of 3 generations of women in rural Korea.

The book begins with the return of Chunhui, a mute young woman, to the ruins of her village after a stay in prison. We then spin back in time to her mother Geumbok, who overcame poverty to become a wealthy entrepreneur in a patriarchal society, and move forward, tracing the rise and fall of her fortune as Korea undergoes modernization, until we reach the present day once more. Throughout the entire tale is interspersed an author's chorus beginning "This/That was the law of..." which conveys a sense of fate and inevitability. The cast of characters contains certain deliberate tropes - the con man/smuggler/pimp, the poor man with a heart of gold - who give the story a fairy tale-like feel.

The book that comes to mind as a comparison is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE - though the tone of the two books is very different - SOLITUDE being almost a dream-like magical realism in comparison to WHALE's earthy, uninhibited one. This doesn't always make for easy, pleasant reading - but it is undeniably captivating.

Update: I read it. It did not win, unfortunately. The other one I thought it was likely to take the honors did. Too bad I dis not enjoy it as much as this one.

Shortlisted for the International Booker prize 2023

I am still reading the novel but I wanted to write a few words about it before the winner is announced Tomorrow. I think the novel has the best chances to win. I loved Boulder more but I am not sure it will win. This one epic, longer and “big” in every way, from the themes explored to the writing style and plot.

“Life is sweeping away the dust that keeps piling up, as she mopped the floor with a rag, and sometimes she would add, Death is nothing more than dust piling up.”

As the writer said in an interview, he did not exactly know what he wanted to read so he put all his ideas in one book. What resulted is the epic fantastic history of a few women. The novel starts in the present with the release from prison of Chunhui, who returns to the ruins of her village. Then we move to a few generation into the past where we begin to follow the destiny of different
characters until we return in the present back to Chunhui. Some of the themes the author discusses are fate, ambition, loss, love, gender struggles, politics, and motherhood. It is a story about big things, big lives, big loves, big turns of fate. It is quite exciting and rich.

Whale is an exciting and funny novel set in South Korea. It tells the story of Geumbok, a determined woman, her daughter Chunhui, who can't speak, and a woman with one eye who controls honeybees. The novel is filled with surprises and humour and gives a fresh perspective on Korea's transition from the past to the present. The story starts in a small village, where Geumbok grows up in poverty but manages to succeed through her wit and determination. Her daughter Chunhui, who can only communicate with elephants, faces loneliness and works in a brickmaking factory. The bond between these two women and their struggles reflect the challenges faced by women in Korean society.

The story combines elements of adventure and satire, with a touch of magic, to explore Korean history and culture. It's like a larger-than-life fairy tale that takes readers on a journey through time. The whale is a symbol that appears throughout the book, representing Geumbok's desire for something greater and the unfulfilled dreams of the characters. The magical realism style is also reminiscent of acclaimed authors such as Gabriel García Márquez or Eka Kurniawan, with their witty mix of fantasy and historical events, creating a unique reading experience. It's like watching an amazing film, which is not surprising considering the author's background in filmmaking (as happens, film is also a leitmotif that fills in the story other than whale).

Whale also captures the essence of "han," a Korean concept of deep-seated emotions like rage, grief, and sorrow. It adds depth to the story, reflecting the characters' internal struggles and the Korean cultural identity. Whale doesn't shy away from depicting violence and brutality. While these scenes may be disturbing, they serve a purpose in showing the challenges faced by the characters and their pursuit of justice. The novel has elements of revenge, as the characters seek retribution for the injustices they face.

I frequently got lost in the middle of reading it. Not getting lost in the sense of missing the plots or scenes, but more like absorbed in the story. The absurdities of the plots often left me uncertain about which stage of the book I was in, yet it didn’t really matter. Throughout the book, there are many memorable moments and images that tug at the heartstrings. One touching scene is when Chunhui imagines talking to Jumbo the Elephant, her only friend. It's a mix of sadness and sweetness that brings tears to my eyes. Whale is a captivating and moving novel that explores Korean history, mother-daughter bonds, and the human spirit.

I really struggled to get into this one. We are first introduced to Chunhui, who has just gotten out of prison and is back at the brickyard where she spent her childhood. Then we hop back and back and back in time, leapfrogging about to different people, but mostly centered on Chunhui's mother, and how she ended up as Chunhui's mother.

I never quite understood what Myeong-Kwan was "doing" with this book. It seemed fairly sexist and -phobic and hateful of various groups on almost every page, and it was hard to have sympathetic feelings for really anyone. Chunhui was the only one I had positive feelings for, but other than her introduction at the beginning, she doesn't come back around until about 60% through the book.

I imagine that Myeong-Kwan's writing in this has intrigued others with its brash, harsh, and unrelenting portrait of what life could look like in this time and place, but I felt too much distaste throughout the book to really ever feel like I enjoyed it, unfortunately.

Did not finish book. Stopped at 11%.
I intensely disliked this, how the hell did this misogynistic crap get long-listed for the International Booker? This is a re-translation to boot, they found this worth translating twice? Why not translate more of Park Wan-Suh's works instead?
Thanks to publisher for ARC.
Content Warnings Graphic: Rape and Sexual assault

3.5 stars rounded up

This weird and wild book takes the reader through a series of fairytale-like scenes, brought together as a series of interconnected stories.

We run the gamut from the intentionally mundane (a brick factory) to the bizarre (a woman who communicates with bees, and another who speaks to elephants), constructing a new history of Korea.

Although it did not always work for me (I sometimes found parts of it gratuitous), there is something still so compelling about the imagination and audacity of the book which kept me intrigued.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to love this but I struggled. Might have just not been in the right headspace to read the truth about how women have been treated. Loved the fairytale/folklore aspect, but didn’t connect with the story.

Whale is the type of novel that creates in you the need to talk and discuss everything that occurs inside its pages.
Women and men alike suffer in this novel. They suffer physical, sexual and psychological abuse. If you have a hard time reading about these topics, beware. Huge trigger warning for violence and all types of abuse.

However, if you give it a chance you will find yourself in a world full of interesting stories which are interconnected to create this magical novel. It is written as a kind of mythological/folklore tale, it has this magical background that gives you some distance from the horrible things that happens to the characters.
There are all kinds of relationships mother-daughter, father-daughter, man-wife and all kinds of different friendships that come to be because of surreal situations.

Whale is shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and I think is well deserved.

Thank you Netgally for the chance to read it.

What a wild book! Whale was an interesting surreal ride to take. I liked the backstory of mother and daughter as well as all the different characters introduced throughout the book. It was quick to read.

Great Expectations meets Korean fairytales in this quirky and at times rambling novel. Telling the story of Geumbok and her daughter, Chunhui; we meet a cast of often exaggerated and fantastical characters. I loved and disliked this novel in equal measure. There were times when the dreamlike, surreal storytelling grabbed my imagination and at other times it just didn’t. The tone, the darkness and violence felt uncomfortable.

Whale – Cheon Myeong-kwan (translated from Korean by Jae Won Chung)

“Life is sweeping away the dust that keeps piling up.”

Another one on the #internationalbookerprize #shortlist that I’ve FINALLY had a chance to review – thanks to @netgalley and @archipelagoeditions for my copy in exchange for an honest review.



‘Whale’ is a sprawling, multi-generational tale set on the Korean peninsula and focused on two women, mother Geumbok and daughter Chunhui. When the book opens, Chunhui is just leaving prison after a decade inside, sentenced for starting a fire that killed 800 people, her mother included, and destroying the whale-shaped cinema built by said mother. How she got to that point is the tale of this book.

It's an odd one to review. I can think of no better word than “bawdy” to describe this whole book, an earthy procession of love, sex, revenge, toil and justice, a heady magical soup of different characters and backstories, plots linking with plots, all building to a huge crescendo. It’s a furiously entertaining mess, one that I thoroughly enjoyed reading, but is it more than that?

I think so, but as a non-Korean I couldn’t go deeper than that. I got glimpses of the little bits of Korean history I know, the tragic war, the communist-capitalist divide that followed, the witch hunts and military dictatorship. It could be a jumping point into a richer historical and cultural knowledge, but I didn’t get that layer. I got sex, films and rock and roll, and was content haha.



Happy to see this on the shortlist, but not my favourite to win. Still recommended if you’d like a coarse, unfiltered tale of magical realism, a modern fairy tale of mothers and daughters, and over-the-top characters and stories.



Have you read this? What did you think?

This book is full of contradictions, and I'm here for it: I HATE meandering novels, and this one meanders quite a bit - but I was still intrigued, because the over-the-top characters and storytelling are captivating. It's also both brutal and hilarious, and it employs magical elements to better illustrate reality, so all in all: ambitious stuff, and that's what the International Booker should highlight. Cheon Myeong-kwan's debut novel was first published in 2003, so it's 20 years old and already considered a contemporary classic in South Korea. Tackling the topic of societal transformation (in this case from pre- to post-modern capitalist society), it has been compared to Great Expectations as well as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The tale focuses on three women and how they navigate changing circumstances while one aspect remains the same: Sexism. Protagonist Geumbok flees her bleak live in a rural area and enters relationships with men who help her survive and then rise in the social ranks. The business-savvy, matter-of-fact woman adapts to the expanding capitalist system by starting several enterprises, the most ambitious one being the cinema in the form of the title-giving whale. Geumbok tortures and neglects the second protagonist, her mute daughter, who gets a storyline of her own. Then, we have a one-eyed woman who directs an army of bees, born into another female line of family trauma. These three narrative strands are intertwined with minor stories about other characters (the most important one being a gangster with a scar), and it's fascinating how the author maintains control of this sprawling concept.

Cheon Myeong-kwan anchors his story with historical references that illustrate political turmoil and the changing social climate during the Fifth and Sixth Republic, but juxtaposes this with (intentionally) implausible twists and turns as well as magical elements that still serve to illustrate the social criticism the text intends to deliver. The language is rather plain, which helps to keep track of the multi-layered action that keeps coming back to the question how women survive in an antagonistic, merciless climate, how society judges them, and how they punish each other for their experiences.

An intriguing read, and a good choice for the International Booker.

Whale is Chi-Young Kim's translation of 고래 by Cheon Myeong-Gwan (천명관). Told in a fable-like tone, Whale tells a woman-centered story of colorful characters and entrepreneurs that mirrors the rise of Korea south of the DMZ, from post-colonial backwater to capitalist darling. The book is violent. Characters are assaulted on page after page. Since most of the key characters are women, a good deal of the violence is against women, as well as against others from marginalized communities including queer people. Women aren't always the victims; one of the early chapters depicts a female character grooming and raping a disabled boy. Whale is undoubtedly a critique of certain aspects of modern Korea, including an examination of the exploitation of the powerless. I appreciate the probing of these issues, but the critique fell flat for me. The crux of the problem is we have an author writing from a position of power, describing in detail the powerlessness of others. Sexual violence seems to be framed as a rite of passage, sometimes described to the point of fetishization. There is nothing empowering about that. The other problem for me is the failure to acknowledge - and in some cases, outright denial - of the problematic nature of this book, both by English language publishers and champions of the novel. While I am supportive of the translation and publication of problematic texts, it is a different story when the problematic nature of the text is obscured or denied. Many thanks to Netgalley and Archipelago for making the digital ARC available. I read the digital ARC in conjunction with the paperback from Europa.

At the start of Whale, we meet Chunhui, a large, mute woman wandering alone at a derelict brick yard in the countryside outside of the ghost town of Pyeongdae. Cheon soon takes us way back to begin the story a generation earlier with the lifestory of Chunhui’s mother Geumbock. Along the way, there’s a pet elephant, a whale (which becomes the inspiration for a whale-shaped cinema), a one-eyed crone who controls bees, and more. Geumbock is a survivor, but more than that, Geumbock is a striver who commands other in the building of a brick factory and a theatre. Chunhui, unable to understand or communicate using language, is both strong but vulnerable. It’s a story which focuses on the expectations and power of women in a country undergoing massive change.

Told using language reminiscent of oral storytelling, there are moments in the midst of the never-boring plot that the narrator breaks the fourth wall to address readers and to intone that an event that happened (usually when a character gets their comeuppance) was because of some kind of law (“this was the law of nature”, “this was the law of rumours”, “this was the law of love” and so on). The repetition of this phrase, along with humour, and the absurdity of some of the characters and situations makes it feel like a folktale that you should be listening to rather than reading (listening to the audiobook might help capture some of that feeling).

In truth, I struggled with Whale. Part of it has to do with the fairytale language (earlier this year I read another book that drew from that tradition and realized it’s one that I don’t easily connect with). More significantly, early in the book, I was put off by descriptions of Chunhui’s size, of another character’s cognitive capabilities (referring to him as “the halfwit”), and of how Geumbock’s scent made her attractive to men. There are also graphically violent scenes which were at times hard for me to take.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do as a reader is to consciously come to a text with respect and humility. The more I choose to read outside of my own culture and lived experience, the more important this becomes, and this is even more so with my 2023 goal of reading literature in translation. Thanks to a recommendation in a recent group read, I’ve added Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World to my TBR to further my learning in this area.

When I struggle with a book that has received accolades and high praise, I try to start by asking myself what it was about how I met the book, what I brought in terms of my own expectations and where I was lacking in terms of background knowledge of history, culture, and literary traditions. Usually, my strategy is to look up reviews and author interviews. Thankfully, when it comes to a Booker nominee, the Booker Prizes has got my back with their reading guides that include summaries, extracts, interviews, and loads more. I highly recommend you check them out.

Reading the interviews and background information was immensely helpful in helping me understand the book and the history and traditions it comes from. I also have to be honest with myself that I didn’t give Whale a fair shot. I read it at the same time as I was engaged in a buddy read of another longlister and the switch between the two styles of books and reading experiences was jarring in a way that wasn’t fair to Whale. It’s probably the kind of book you should read monogamously where you can become immersed in its world of magical realism and storytelling.

Whale is probably one of the more unique reads on this year’s International Booker long (and now short) list and I’ll be interested to see how it fares. It’s made me question myself as a reader and that’s a good thing. I won’t soon forget it’s characters and their stories.