This book revolved around a family and their detailed lifestyle, adventures, and misfortunes. At first, we met the girl Chunhui, known as the queen of red brick. However, this book will take us back to people who live long before Chunhui, and the history of Chunhui mother herself, geumbok.

This book remind me a lot with Beauty is Wound by Eka Kurniawan.

For me, the storytelling and pace is not my favourite. I'm just not patient enough and I found myself struggled to finish this book. It stretches going back and forth from the past to present.

Character wise, I have this love hate relationship with geumbok. For a woman in that time to be able to do what she did is an applause. However, there were questionable decisions of her that made me go 🤧.
The accountability for the characters' action is concerning. It threw so effortlessly rape and SA. I found it uncomfortable and disturbing. It might be common for the setting based on the time and place the book is in, but it doesn't make it bearable to read.

If you love speculative fiction, magical realism combined with historical trivias, this book is perfect for you.

I had to DNF this one unfortunately part way through chapter two once the author continually referred to a character as a “half wit” and had a character sexually assault this character with an intellectual disability. Thank you NetGalley for the advanced copy nonetheless.

I enjoyed this book, with some mixed feelings. Younger Geumbok is a fascinating character, as are Chunhui, Mun, and several others. The twenty-years-after chapter with the architect is heartbreaking and heartwarming, and then the epilogues are heartbreaking all over again. I even liked the anthropomorphized elephant as Chunhui’s best friend (I am no fan of talking animals lol).

I was absolutely loving this book until the 67% point, when Geumbok makes her big change (being vague to avoid spoilers!) and it just didn’t fit with the rest of the story…and the reasoning presented in the story itself made no sense at that point in her life. It just felt so…unnecessary and a bit misogynistic. This book was originally published in 2004 in South Korea, and I wonder if I am missing some historic or cultural context?

Cinematic and fantastical, the satirical Whale is a dark fairy-tale exploring South Korea’s social and economic evolution in the wake of the Korean War. With larger than life characters, this novel mixes violence with black humour for an unsettling, yet engrossing read.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Three parts story chronicled the life of mother and daughter in a post Korean War life as we followed these titular character's ups and downs. Cheon's multi-generational family saga focused mainly on the women's character bringing you into their explicitly devastating world filled with patriarchal notions and inequality with traditional cultures embed in daily life. With a dark fairytale like tone or accurately, folk tale narrate the whole story from the introduction of the past prison days of Chunhui to the beginning of Geumbok's life to become the most successful businesswoman ever and to the tragic ending of Chunhui that left you sympathise with her.

I like the dark humor tone and the fairytale like plot but i detest the oversexualization of the female characters in here. There is not a repercussions on rape and sexual assault, the violence and the whole graphicness of them.

By turns fascinating, disgusting, horrifying and compelling - one of the most interesting and unique offerings from the International Booker longlist. Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for a free ebook in exchange for an honest review.

An unusual read with lots of magical realism. Unfortunately there was also sexual violence which I found a bit much.

The second that Whale was announced on the longlist for International Booker Prize, it went on my TBR. And when I learned it was still on NetGalley at that point!!! I hopped over there and snagged the PDF. I was not disappointed. Whale is a beautiful story, winding in scope, cleverly told and translated, and absolutely enchanting.

Chunhui, a mute woman known for her size and uncommon strength, returns to the abandoned brickyard her family once owned, after being released from prison. And she begins to restore it and make bricks. How did this happen? How did she get here? The story begins before Chunhui was born, first with her mother Geumbok’s travels, business acumen, and beauty, and even before that, an old crone living in a rundown house in the village Pyeongdae. We go back through their stories to get to Chunhui’s.

These characters are so bright, and also timeless. I felt like I was reading a time-honoured epic, and it was so twisty and detailed, but never draggy or difficult. Definitely spectacular.

This book was a ride. It mainly focuses on two women, Geumbok is the mother and Chunhui is the daughter. We follow first the mothers story from running away from her town to establishing herself as a business woman. Then, we follow Chunhui, growing up being different and learning the family business of making bricks, up to her last days. It also has glimpses on how the Korean society was changing throughout all this time.

This book also makes a commentary about misogyny by exaggerating and almost twisting it to a point in which it almost felt non-sensical. I am not sure how successful it was at that, although I fond some of the commentary quite poignant. Other times, it was just too brutal to a point in which it was not furthering anything and I wanted to stop reading.

In terms of the writing style, it feels very whimsical and detached. We do not get to know the thoughts of the characters in detail (I think intentionally), and therefore the book does not try to make an emotional connection with the reader by sharing feelings and thoughts. There is a lot of foreshadowing throughout the book as well, which sometimes worked but sometimes didn't. There is also touches of magical realism, which increase the feeling that it almost reads like a fairy tale. And mostly, the book was violent and brutal from beginning to end, so if that is not your thing, maybe stay away from it.

The narrative really catches up with us very effectively. There will surely be diverse feelings on this book but all of them would surely have a fresh read, the characters being in their raw form is something very nice to read. The base these characters get is the strongest that I've read in recent times.
The korean popular will surely get a lot of good response in the translated editionz the translation did its best and there was some nice touch to the korean aesthetic that isn't lost in the translation, we will not forget that we are reading a korean book and thats some nice translation for that.

A confusing read. Abit hit and miss that was quite dark. I enjoyed it at times but others hard to understand. Would read again though.

This book left me a bit confused on what I feel. Although I’m glad I read something different but there were hits and misses with this one. The magical realism didn’t really offset how dark this was..
I might reread this in the future and hope to like it a bit more then.

Whale has been called Korea's answer to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Naturally, that being one of my favourite books ever, I was excited. I suppose I expected that the main similarity was going to be magic realism, and even that felt different. Myeong-Kwan's style in this novel feels closer to a fairy-tale than to the magic realism of Marquez. There's talking elephants, super-strong girls, magical sex-changing, etc. The fairy-tale tone doesn't save the books darkness. I haven't read this much rape in a single novel for a little while; there's a lot. And worse yet, it's all reported with utter indifference. It felt slightly less satirical than promised, though the chapters on communism around the brick-making were certainly playful. It's just too long, and the fairy-tale tone is unceasing for all it's 400 ish pages. I read the first quarter in one go, then started to get bored, a little restless of the tone, and slowed down. The magical realism never felt wholly convincing (in the world of the novel), or maybe it felt as if Myeong-Kwan hasn't committed enough to it. Maybe just too much plot. I'm glad I read it though, certainly something different and for that reason, worthwhile in its own way but I wouldn't jump to necessarily recommend it, especially with the amount of violence and sexual assault. A shame, because whales are my favourite animal.

3.5

I really thought I was going to like this in the beginning. The violence against women completely put me off at first, but it definitely lessened as the book went on. I found something about the prose compelling so I continued and grew to care about the characters. Ultimately I felt it was a bit too long and rambly, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit.

With 'Whale' being described online as a satirical short story collection, I wasn't entirely sure whether I was going to like it or not - but boy, was I wrong. 'Whale' is a sprawling, fantastically bizarre family saga that spans decades following mother and daughter who have quite the odd relationship. Myeong-Kwan crafts side characters who are equally as important to the plot as Guembok and Chunhui - a plot that is continually thickening and never ceases to be interesting throughout its entire 400 pages. Normally I don't enjoy a satirical novel, especially if it satiric is subtle, and difficult to discern whether it is being serious or not but Myeong-Kwan is so bold and confident with his satiric writing that I think this is the first time I have ever enjoyed a novel of this sort.

Short stories are not usually my cup of tea but this one was done so artfully and cleverly that it's hard not to love. These stories all are interlinked with the same characters and instead form this huge overarching novel in which everything comes together in the end, with any questions being cleared up and clarified in not one, but TWO epilogues.

Not everything that occurs in this novel is likable - in fact, some instances can be deemed as quite uncomfortable and maybe not all necessary. However, it didn't subtract from the fact that Myeong-Kwan's work is deeply absorbing and sucked me in; I found myself picking this book up at any given opportunity and managed to finish it in a speedy two days. I'd be super interested in reading more of his work if anything else has been translated.

Thank you very much to NetGalley for allowing me to download the PDF of this book.

A magical-realist trip through mid-century Korea, featuring shifting viewpoints. It's really rare to see omniscient third person POV these days; but this also contains a lot of active awareness that this is a narrative.

I didn't actually expect that magical realist feel here; I also didn't expect all the violence against women, which really detracted from the narrative. It was too detached, yet also seemed to gloat in misery, like it was a sideshow featuring pain.

A whistle-stop tour through some unspecified period of Korean history, but likely to be in mid twentieth century. Our narrator has a cast of puppets who are whisked onto the stage of the page, strut their stuff before being just as quickly whisked off. But then again, “this is the law of …” as the book so often repeats. Despite being our two main characters, Chunhui and Geumbok are just as sketchy as the other characters - I never got a sense of things that they liked, or whether they’d have any chat down the pub.

I found the depiction of women to be frequently troubling - all sexually alluring - as well as most men having no self-control which is equally problematic.

A different read but not one I’ll be repeating. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.